keeps same volume setting between iTunes and QuickTime player gets rid of one or two bugs in the above lines I haven't done a lot of testing with what happens when you have multiple windows already open in Quicktime Player, so I could be wrong on guessing my_movie in the script. Note that the pitch is unaffected - only the playback rate changes. So, when my iTunes shows that I have 45 minutes left on a podcast, and I'd rather hear that in 30 minutes, I pull down my script menu to reveal and execute the following AppleScript (saved in my user's Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> iTunes folder as Play this song at 1.5x): tell application 'iTunes' pause set my_track to location of current track set my_seconds to player positionend telltell application 'QuickTime Player' open my_track set my_movie to first movie set ts to time scale of my_movie set current time of my_movie to my_seconds * ts set rate of my_movie to 1.5 - starts playingend tellBasically, this tells iTunes to stop playing the podcast, figures out where I am in the podcast, then tells QuickTime Player to start playing the podcast at the same place (within a second), but at 1.5 times the speed. I subscribe to far-too-many podcasts now, and I've found that most of the podcasters can actually be cleanly understood even if you speed up their speech by 50%.