I'm subscribed to too many podcasts now. Most of them sound just fine at the 1.5x playback speed in quicktime player. I'm now using this applescript when I hit a longer podcast to pop it into quicktime player at 1.5x at the current playback position.
tell application "iTunes" pause set my_track to location of current track set my_seconds to player position end tell tell application "QuickTime Player" open my_track set my_movie to last movie set ts to time scale of my_movie set current time of my_movie to my_seconds * ts set rate of last movie to 1.5 -- starts playing end tellAreas for improvement... set up an on-idle loop to mirror the play position back to itunes automatically.
If you come up with better ideas, let me know.
