This is an ideas, innovation, and invention blog - isn’t it the right time to invent something?

Often one wants to alter the pace of audio media, without distorting the pitch. Common use cases, are that you have some recorded material you want to listen to, on your PC, or on your iPod or smartphone, or other devices and either:

• The narrator is too slow for you - you can speed it up, and still understand what you need to, or …
• Yow want to slow it down, to fit your pace, or be able to write key points.

Some media players have controls that allow that, but their granularity is not very good. Even those that have good pacing (e.g. VLC for windows, for some reason Mac version does not) distort the audio so its pitch is higher for fast pace.

The invention is to alter the audio pace, maintaining the speaker authenticity of voice, to stay natural. Simple signal processing tend to make the distortion, but for human voice, whose characteristics are more predictable and narrower than generic sounds, a solution may be easier to implement. First solutions can do it in software, and than benefit from HW audio processing. 

Usage scenario may include enjoying audiobooks, rewriting lectures, and later even making smooth audio transitions to fit video playback, so you can actually fast forward a movie while seeing it, understanding all, and the sound will be mostly natural. 

Harry potter Octologoy (last book has 2 movies) in one cross atlantic flight?