BBC 'Chipmunked' on Odeo.com

I've been trying out Odeo, the new website that aims to make listening to and creating podcasts easy.

It seems pretty good so far, but I was amused to hear the usually deep sounding Radio 4 voice having been sped up.

Odeo calls this 'chipmunking', and explains why it happens in its FAQ:

The reason for this is that the Flash player has a hard time dealing with files that are encoded at a rate that is not a multiple of 11.025 kHz. The result is what we call the 'chipmunk' effect. Just consider it a feature-get through podcasts faster! Note, when you download the file, it will play normally on your computer or device. Publishers: To avoid being chipmunked, encode all MP3's [sic] at 11.025 22.05 or 44.1 kHz.

A bit of a problem if you ask me, and I'm not sure that telling publishers to encode their files differently is a solution...