In Ardour 5 I am able to simply slide the playback speed slider ("shuttle speed control") to start playing at >1x speed, and after releasing the mouse button it keeps on playing at that speed.
In v6+ the sliding part still works, but upon releasing it the slider springs immediately back to 1x, so I can't easily select a playback speed and keep it going. As a workaround there's the varispeed option, but for me it's not as intuitive (it uses semitones instead of "Xs" as its unit), and feels much less flexible. I could probably live with it if I was forced into it, but I much prefer v5's behavior.
"Within this general behavior several variations are available as Ripple edit modes: [...] 3. Interview. This mode works just like the Selected mode with one exception: when you select a range and press Del, this will remove the selected portion of either audio or MIDI without shifting other clips to the left to match the freed space on the timeline. The main use case for this mode is editing interviews where you want the ripple behavior to edit out e.g. periods of silence, while being able to just delete e.g. an out-of-place noise or an exclamation by the interviewer."
I just realized you're an Ardour developer, so thank you for the awesome piece of free software, and I hope my comment didn't sound too whiny. I love Ardour and still recommend it to other podcasters at every chance I have, especially when I see people using Audacity for that task while Ardour is clearly the better option given its non-destructiveness.
In v6+ the sliding part still works, but upon releasing it the slider springs immediately back to 1x, so I can't easily select a playback speed and keep it going. As a workaround there's the varispeed option, but for me it's not as intuitive (it uses semitones instead of "Xs" as its unit), and feels much less flexible. I could probably live with it if I was forced into it, but I much prefer v5's behavior.