use Perl

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 tell

Areas 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.