playback speed request- listen to audiobooks at 1.5x

Since Sonos only opens up their systems to other companies, you should probably ask your audio book provider to work on this…..l

Audible does have this feature, but Sonos is not showing up as an option for Audible's connected devices. 

Which could mean Audible does not make this feature available through the Sonos app, or that Sonos does not offer the possibility to do this. I’d first ask Audible why they do not offer this possibility through the Sonos app.

The Sonos app has reasonable podcast support (with skip back/fwd/save/restore position) but nothing specific to audiobooks that I can see, and no options exposed for services to adjust playback speed. Any speed adjustment would have to be done by the provider’s service, which is unfortunate (and unlikely imho).

I would think adjusting the playback speed would be rather cumbersome for Sonos, as a multiroom audio system, to accomplish.   It already has the difficult task of getting the data from the source, communicating to all speakers involved in the playback, and timing everything to play at the same time.  Getting the data faster and ‘compressing’ just adds more to it.  Very different when you have a standalone player such as your phone.  The audiobook app just gets the data and can build up a cache, and just play faster without working out communicating and timing with other speakers.

So I would suspect with Sonos, it would be much easier if the source just sent a 1.5x faster version of the audio it’s sending to Sonos.  Therefore, Sonos doesn’t do anything different on their end.  Unfortunately, I would guess the audiobook  source (whatever company it is) has little interest in that since they don’t need to do the same for their own phone apps.

Hi @Blanooooo 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Thank you - I've marked this thread as a feature request and it will be seen by the relevant teams for consideration. Keep the ideas coming!

SONOS plays online services in real time. Running at 1.5x would require playing future content now. The online service must provide a separate stream that runs at 1.5x. As others have noted, the service provider must provide this feature.

One way that you can have this feature now would be to use the service provider’s App on a phone/pad/computer and send output to the SONOS system directly (for example, SPOTIFY) or using AirPlay 2.

Audio is not played from the services in “real time” - data is gulped down in blocks, and at a much lower bitrate than, say, any video streaming service. To play at 1.5x it just grabs the data 1.5x faster than usual, which is no worse than a 50% higher bitrate, and for audio this is easy (video would be trickier). As some services offer lossless data already, higher bitrates are clearly possible on current S2 hardware.

Yes, this is feasible for pre-recorded music and podcasts if both the server and player support the feature. For live broadcasts one must play as the data becomes available or record the session for later playback at the faster rate.

I also, would love to see this feature come to Sonos. I love my Sonos products, and enjoy audible integration in the app. Myself, I am a blind user, and always listen to my books a bit faster, on my Amazon Echoes and my phone. Thank you much for considering this feature request.

I made a discovery. If I play to sonos using Apple Airplay, I can play my books at 1.5 or 2.0 speed. I would think if it works through airplay, it should be not too difficult to implement in the sonos app, or while connected to sonos in the audible app.

Why would you think that? Two different playback systems involved, one the normal iOS app running the playback, the other the Sonos app running on the speakers. To my knowledge (granted, several years old), there is currently no support in the SMAPI(Sonos Music API)  for speeded up playback. It’s been a request for years, as of yet un implemented. 

Indeed. SMAPI has explicit podcast support but nothing to adjust playback speed, see https://devdocs.sonos.com/docs/add-podcasts

Please add this feature. Increasing speed in the podcasts is almost a default featuring in any audios system right now. 

I understand reason stems from competition and licensing of patents between Sonos and Amazon. Amazon won't allow it because Sonos competes with their Alexa sound playing devices. Very unfortunate as I've been asking for this for almost 10 years.

It won't do any good to ask Amazon/Audible to allow it as it is not in their interest. Sonos would have to pay too much for it.