ohrenkino: I tried the 00:%_length% and it does give you minutes and seconds BUT you cannot SUM the column. Excel is so darn picky. If you try to sum the column Excel will go to the first entry and request a formula. When I first started with Mp3Tag I had problems with time and that was years ago. I went to the Excel Forums and a guy gave me the formula to convert the time into minutes and seconds, again I am not a programmer so I had to rely on someone to help. Once the data is in Excel you have to insert another column in front of the time (length) column then format that column using format>custom>mm:ss. In the first cell you have a formula:=TIME(0,INT(J124),MOD(J124,1)*60) this will convert the hours and minutes into minutes and seconds. Once the formula is done just copy (FILL) down and everything is converted. The last cell can be formatted using format>custom>dd:hh:mm:ss and it will give you the total of how long it will take you to play every song you have. Why this? Well, you could say it's interesting to see how long it takes to play all your songs. Your albums, which I have over 118 and counting, even though you know how long it takes to play them, converted to mp3 and placed into your song collection, I have mine in separate folders and have them in Excel as well, total time still must be converted to hours, minutes and seconds. The Bottomline was to see if there was an easier way for Mp3Tag to convert length into a format that Excel could understand and calculate unfortunately it cant Thought I have the formula to change the time I was hoping that Mp3Tag could do it
I am not sure what you do ...
The column with the time gets imported as "user-defined" with hh:mm:ss as pattern.
The function to auto-sum that column sums up all seconds, minutes and hours without the need to add other fomulars.
The shown amount is, BTW, exactly that what MP3tag has calculated:
The biggest window part shows the excel sheet, the cut-off part further down is the MP3tag window status bar of the same files.
So I would again advise you to use the MP3tag built-in variable %_total_time% and add that as the last output in your export script.
Excel needs a custom time format for the column in this case. You can format it as time, use mm:SS and everything should work for you. As long as you don’t have any with more than 60 minutes.
EDIT:
Looks like Excel will always force these values to start with ours first. So this is a limitation there.
I did find this potential solution to use when exporting from mp3tag, using the %_length_seconds% seconds-only value, then applying a new column in Excel with a formula. It’s the closest I can find to get that which you seek.
https://geekexcel.com/excel-formula-to-convert-seconds-to-hhmmss-time-format/
The tip you link to, which uses TIME() is slightly cumbersome. Excel stores times as parts of a day (and dates as a number of days). Therefore it suffices to divide the number of seconds by 86400 s/d = 24 h/d × 60 min/h × 60 s/min. Then format it as a duration. One could enforce that with =TEXT(seconds/86400, "[h]:mm:ss").
I know this is a late response, and I am assuming that you are trying to achieve the time format in "HH:MM:SS", even if its less than 60 seconds/1 minute or less than an hour (aka MM:SS)? If you want to, for example, convert an "MM:SS", 4 minutes and 32 seconds (i.e. "04:32") or just 9 seconds (i.e. "00:09") into HH:MM:SS (i.e. "00:04:32" and "00:00:09"), then use this single-line replace function below that I wrote:
$replace(%_length%,$regexp(%_length%,'^(\d{2}:\d{2})$',$1),$regexp(%_length%,'^(\d{2}:\d{2})$',00:$1))
Likewise, it will NOT alter the length format of files greater than an hour. Basically, it will keep, for example, 1 hour 39 mins 47 seconds ("01:39:47") as "01:39:47". Moreover, under COLUMNS, you can replace "%_length%" with my string above to represent all durations (aka "%_length%") as "HH:MM:SS".