okay so I was already listening to your episode at 1.5x speed and when you did the little demonstration to speed it up to 1.8 times it was really flying ha ha! I don't know what the actual speed would've been at that point (2.7x?) but I had to slow it back down to normal speed on my podcast app and listen again to get the true effect.

 By the way I use Beyondpod with the Presto sound library and listen to nearly everything at 1.5x speed by simply adjusting the settings in the app. You can actually set a default playback speed for individual podcast feeds so that you always have the correct speed. I also listen at variable speed using Rockbox on my iPod fourth-gen. So I don't really need the variable speed to be built into the audio file, but I am intrigued by the silence truncation thing. Will definitely poke around with that a bit. Thanks for an interesting episode.