Peyton Todd

Q: How convert the 'Time' to a readable value?

When I simply print an iTunes playlist directly to my printer, the time taken by each song comes out in easily readable fashion as e.g. 3:27 or 3:08 (minutes and seconds). Unfortunately iTunes's choice of printed format doesn't work for our situation (a dance group that needs to list more songs on a single page for the program of dances to be played each week than would fit on one of the pages in the iTunes print-out). I have learned how export the playlist to a text file and load that to Microsoft Excel (which can print more lines per page), but the time taken by each song comes out as just a number (e.g. 207 and 188 for the examples just given). Those values turn out to be a constant percent of the minutes + seconds figures. So it should be possible to convert them. But how? It's not among the options provided by Excel when it loads a text file.

 

I would hate to have to convert every single one by hand!

 

Thanks.

 

P.S. I have a Mac Mini as indicated below, but the problems I'm describing are happening on my Windows 7 PC.

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Sep 25, 2016 10:04 AM

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Q: How convert the 'Time' to a readable value?

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  • by ed2345,Solvedanswer

    ed2345 ed2345 Sep 25, 2016 3:36 PM in response to Peyton Todd
    Level 7 (24,955 points)
    Sep 25, 2016 3:36 PM in response to Peyton Todd

    Instead of dealing with the export, it might be easier to simply Copy (from Songs view in your iTunes library), and Paste into Excel. 

     

    So if you have this in your library:

    ...you will have this in Excel:

    Notice that the times stay in mm:ss format.

  • by Peyton Todd,

    Peyton Todd Peyton Todd Sep 26, 2016 1:04 PM in response to ed2345
    Level 1 (8 points)
    iCloud
    Sep 26, 2016 1:04 PM in response to ed2345

    Thanks, that works very well. I was tempted to postpone clicking 'This solved my question' in hopes someone would come up with a way to do the conversion automatically without this workaround, but I'm convinced none exists. I regard this as an unfortunate bug that I blame Apple and Microsoft for!

  • by ed2345,

    ed2345 ed2345 Sep 26, 2016 5:56 PM in response to Peyton Todd
    Level 7 (24,955 points)
    Sep 26, 2016 5:56 PM in response to Peyton Todd

    Peyton Todd wrote:

     

    Thanks, that works very well.

    Peyton,

    Glad it worked out.  Enjoy the music!

    Ed