Posted by Mark Withall: 2012-08-02

For quite some time it has bugged me that selecting 2x in the Music app on iOS doesn’t play back the selected audio in half the time. I have, therefore, taken the time to measure the playback time in my two most used apps: Apple Podcasts and Audible.

The experiment was simple: play 1 minute of audio at each of the different speed options and time them. The results were as follows (times are only approximate, as they were manually timed using my wristwatch).

  • Podcasts Hair (2x): 41s
  • Podcasts Tortoise (0.5x): 1m19s
  • Audible 1.5x: 48s
  • Audible 2x: 41s
  • Audible 3x: 31s

This doesn’t really shed any light on the naming of the speed options but at least I can now judge roughly how long it will take to play an audio file of a given length at each of the speeds.