For VLC mobile, in advanced, uncheck timestretch and audacity can do this. Youtube, spotify and others will keep pitch which is called time-stretching. This is what gives that choppy effect. I use it even for podcasts when something is said quickly. So with “regular” speed reduction, it defeats the purpose of slowing down as it makes it much harder to hear what is being said. Without time-stretching, it sounds just like slowing down a 12" record or tape, allowing a slower speed to figure out what was said. There was one episode a few years ago about vintage mice brands and I couldn’t find it even a few years ago (I download my podcasts, still couldn’t figure out which one it was), but I would have liked to slow it down because so many different varieties of mice were mentioned. I think most people don’t need new peripherals, and used hardware with a good cleaning will work just as well. That’s way off the topic of this thread, but an example of why I might slow down a podcast.
I enjoy listening to (and I’m glad it has been mentioned on the show) Bone Thugs, I have both the LP of art of war, and a digital flac album of it, and I slow down the speed for both heavier bass and to keep up with the lyrics.
Even listening to Fleetwood Mac - Gypsy at a lower speed is great, different tempo and the guitar solos last a bit longer.
What are some artists that you play at slower speeds?
This can also be done with streaming music services, but so far, no app in existance allows speed adjustment for music, except youtube, and it sounds terrible
This is wby I suggest the desktop / laptop Firefox browser extension global speed.
Turn on the option allow pitch shift which simply turns off the default html pitch preservation setting.
It works nearly everywhere with just ONE exception: premium / or premium half-hour mode in Pandora. The radio mode works properly with both browser dev tools, and this extension.