Fast feed for hungry ears, and slow listening for non natives

Phil Windley's Technometria | Speeding Up Podcasts

An interesting apporach: If you're too busy to really listen to those long boring podcast shows, why not make it run faster to save time? Phil Windley from IT conversations and Technometria blog llke to listen at 1.5x - unless he really want to listen and learn!

Phil W. has got some nice info on how to do this trick - and more pops up in the comments.One reader who is non English, prefer slowing down the speed to be able to liten more carefully -  I think I can follow him there.Much of the fast paced  radio host babble American style is really hopelessly fast running:-)
 The iPod supports speeding up playback of audiobooks, which are different, in Apple’s nomenclature, from podcasts. An audiobook is an ACC format file with the extension .m4b (opposed to the normal .m4a extension). So, you have to convert the selection to ACC (since most things are MP3s, then rename the file, and reimport.