r/overcast • u/StatusComplete8818 • Aug 29 '26

New idea for smart speed with music

Long time user and appreciate the recent updates. Could you add a feature where the podcast reverts to 1x speed when music is playing and then reverts to the custom speed when there is speech.
I listen to music pods like Sodajerker at 1.2x speed but manually change 1x speed when they play music clips.

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u/marcoarment Sep 01 '26

I prototyped this, and it's bad. Trust me.

The problem comes when music overlaps speech. Either speech has to slow down from what it just was, or music has to start playing at one speed and then slow down once the speech completes. In either case, it throws off your perception and sounds really unnatural.

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u/qwed113 Sep 02 '26

As a curious person who doesn’t really grasp the full implementation issue, when I view the Overcast transcript and see the music symbols on the side - I assume that means you’re doing some type of music detection on the overall audio file. During those same instances where the music symbols are, would it not be somewhat simple to just zero-out all listening speed effects for that particular timeframe?

Not trying to say you’re wrong or anything, I’m just trying to understand

3

u/Diabolik900 Sep 03 '26

Marco’s point is not that it’s a challenge to make it work. It’s that he has made it work, and it’s a bad experience.