Last night I tweeted that I dislike podcast apps advertising playback speeds that are not the real ones. I feel like they are stealing my time. Imagine you have a 15 minutes break or you want to exercise for 15 minutes. You choose one episode whose playtime is around 30 minutes so you’re able to finish it. Surprise! That’s not going to happen, as what is written on the can as 2x is actually a completely different playback speed.
Two iOS podcast apps that are doing this are Instacast and Downcast. These are very popular iOS apps, so I assume that either nobody really cares about real playback speed or that there is some inherent iOS limitation that doesn’t allow them to do it or that podcast publishers are in some sort of coallition with app developers (maybe even Apple?) to disallow listeners to consume the podcasts at high speed.
Downcast comes with a wide range of speed options, but except the normal 1x, there rest are not real. Here is the conversion table for Downcast:
| Conf speed | Real speed |
|---|---|
| 0.5x | 0.8x |
| 1.25x | 1.15x |
| 1.5x | 1.3x |
| 1.75x | 1.42x |
| 2x | 1.55x |
| 2.5x | 1.67x |
| 2.75x | 1.73x |
| 3x | 1.8x |
Instacast comes with only 4 options: .5x, 1x, 1.5x, 2x. But once again, except the 1x, the rest of the playback speeds are not the real ones:
| Conf speed | Real speed |
|---|---|
| 0.5x | 0.75x |
| 1.5x | 1.25x |
| 2x | 1.5x |
In conclusion, don’t rely on your podcast app to estimate the time spent listening to the podcast.
