Windows Media Player has a well-hidden advanced playback control that allows you to vary the speed at which a media clip is played back. This feature, it turns out, is ideal for listening to broadcasts that emphasize the spoken word, such as podcasts and vlogs. This feature does much more than simply rewind or fast-forward a media clip; it performs time compression and expansion, speeding up or slowing down the pace of playback but maintaining audio and video fidelity—keeping a narrator or host’s voice from sounding like a cartoon character when the audio or video clip is played at faster than normal speed.
Use this feature to “speed read” an instructional video or a podcast, for example, viewing or listening to the full program in a fraction of its normal running time while still being able to understand the audio.
To adjust playback speed, click Now Playing in the Features taskbar and then choose View, Enhancements, Play Speed Settings. (If this option doesn’t seem to work, choose View, Enhancements, and then click to add a check mark to the left of Show Enhancements.) The main Play Speed Settings control, shown here, is a slider that you can drag along a wide range. Drag to the right to speed up playback, to the left to slow things down. (Choosing a negative number causes a video clip to play backwards.)
You can also use two presets above the slider controls at the bottom of the Windows Media Player window. (The Fast Play control is shown here.)
Clicking the Rewind and Fast Play controls once causes the player to work at half-speed and 1.4 times normal speed, respectively. Keep clicking to step through four presets. For podcasts, the first click on the Fast Play control will give best results. In my experiments, I was able to play back a 10-minute podcast in just over 7 minutes. The audio has a slightly clipped quality to it, but voices sound perfectly natural.
[Note: This tip is adapted from Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition.]
Ed Bott 
This works great, but when you switch back to an mp3 player everyone seems to talk slooowwwwer.
I found that early on when listening to podcasts on my computer and love it. Now I just wish that I could find a command-line encoder that I could do the same thing with for transferring those speeded-up tempo’s to my mp3 player (ipod, creative player etc).
So far I see audacity CAN do it…but no commandline support. Several old audio manipulation programs that can do it…but nothing command-line driven.
Searches for “fast” and “increase speed” always give results relating to the speed it takes to ENCODE the mp3, and not the adjusting of the speed playback. After much stumbling around I found some other keyword searches like “tempo” but there’s only a limited result from that too. Anyone else have something out there?
Any info appreciated (drop me an E-mail too would be much appreciated)
Thanks,
David Troesch