Time calculator for recording music

I'm looking for a formula that will add time in minutes and seconds for the purpose of recording music.
For example, the first song is 9 minutes, 9:00.
the next song would be 4 minutes 40 seconds. 4:40
the total would be 13 minutes and 40 seconds.

I would song after song until I found out how much time it would take to record the music.
Any ideas?

Originally Posted by PGMalan

the next song would be 4 minutes 40 seconds. 4:40

When you enter time in the form 4:40, Excel interprets that as 4h 40m, not 4m 40s.

You must enter the times in the form 4:40.0 or 0:4:40.

Then, if the individual song times are entered into B2:B11, you simply use the formula =SUM(B2:B11) to calculate the total.

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You should also format the cells as Custom [m]:ss.

The format "[m]", instead of just "m", allows for displaying time in minutes that might exceed 60m.

That is especially important to do for the cell where you calculate the total time.

But it does not hurt to do it for all time cells. In fact, using the format [m]:ss in all cells might expose data entry errors that "mysteriously" result in incorrect totals.

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Although you might get away with the simple formula =SUM(B2:B11), it is prudent to explicitly round calculated times to the second, in order to avoid anomalies of internal binary arithmetic.

So, it would be more reliable to write =--TEXT(SUM(B2:B11),"[h]:m:s"), formatted as Custom [m]:ss.

The double negation ("--") is one way to convert the text to a numeric result.

I have adapted one of my recent timer apps to included total elapsed time.
It should be intuitive to use.
Any queries post back on this site.
torachan.