Pace is everything. Whether I’m sitting in Sacrament Meeting or Young Men’s or Primary, when the speaker gets too slow, the audience fades away. If the speaker maintains an upbeat tempo, it’s much easier to pay attention (except when Elder Lynn G. Robbins gave the “To Be or Not To Be” talk in April of 2011 – it was so deep, I could barely keep up! But I digress…)
So when I decided to start listening to the Book of Mormon on my commute to work, I was completely and utterly bummed out when I started listening to the Church’s production on MP3. It needs a warning from the Surgeon General about causing drowsiness, or at least it should advise you not to listen to it while driving or operating heavy machinery. It is impossible to get through. I almost decided to abandon the effort, but then I devised a plan.
I went home and ran all the files through some software to speed them up by 45%. Any faster and it becomes “Alvin and the Chipmunks Read the Book of Mormon.” Any slower and you’ll still fall asleep. 45% was the sweet spot, and it worked for me.
Speeding up the pace of the reading accomplished two things. This took the total length of time to listen to the entire collection from 26 hours down to 18 hours – not too shabby. But much more importantly, it brought the rate of speech up to the pace of an excited conversation, one that you’d want to pay attention to.
With the newer, faster version, I had to pay attention a lot more, and do more active listening, because it’s moving along with or without you. The slightly higher pitch feels a little more aggressive and interesting. The story progresses and you feel like you’re getting somewhere. You can finish two or three chapters on a 20 minute drive, and you feel like you’ve accomplished something. Honestly, it still takes a while to get through it. Jacob 5 is still 15 minutes long, but at least it’s not 22 minutes like in the original!
Anyway, once I mentioned the fact that I had a sped-up version to some of my friends, I had several requests for copies. And since this has become a place to host all my little LDS-hacks over the past few years, I guess I’ll share them with you. All the sped-up MP3s are in a nice little zip file, only 243MB – small enough for any smart phone, MP3 CD, or Ipod.
To download, right click on the following link, and then unzip them on your computer:
Fast_BOM.zip
Maybe they’ll work for you, maybe they’re not at the right speed, maybe you prefer to sit down and read everyday; but hopefully for someone somewhere, these might just be able to get some of us back into the scriptures again. It did the trick for me.
(Direct download link for the original, slower MP3s here: Official Book of Mormon MP3s)
P.S. I know some people get really worried about copyright, but I’m not so concerned. If a Church representative would like me to take these down, that’s fine, but I think they would realize the intent is to increase exposure to the scriptures for free, and who is going to get mad about that? So go ahead and download guilt-free. I’ll take the fall for you if someone gets cranky.