At 04:19 2002-04-20 +0800, Autrijus Tang wrote:
I'll go with 00:12:15, even hardcoding '00:'.
Weeeelll... if the tracks ever do get over an hour and the "00:" is
hardcoded, then it'll read like 00:71:31, which is pretty weird. But I see
your point.
At 14:20 2002-04-19 -0600, Mary Shaw wrote:
12:15 could look like a quarter after noon to not-so-smart-as-us people.
Others might mistake the duration for hours and minutes, since that is the
notation used by most clocks. At the same time, the other notations
aren't common enough to make sense to everyone.
True, 12:15 could be duration in hours and minutes, or a time of day. But
I think in the context of what is almost always a list of songs, people
aren't likely to make that mistake, esp. given the column heading that says
"Duration" in their language of choice. (Not that people carefully read
those headings all the time, but anyway.)
Have you considered and rejected 00:12:15 for any particular reason? It
may not be likely that your times could spill over into hours, but if it
did, this would accommodate that.
Not really, but:
* No CD in my collection, from anywhere in the world, seems to use it. (In
fact, most say things like "Total time: 71:26" where they could say "Total
time: 1:11:26"
* I worry that people will be sort of visually annoyed by great big columns
of almost everything having a leading "00:".
* I could make Apache::MP3 use hh:mm:ss, but currently it's set to do this
in several places:
sprintf "%dm %2.2ds", ...minute_expression..., ...seconds_expression...
and I'm reluctant to alter it any more than I have to, like to accomodate
an hours figure in there.
I think I'll go with just "12:15", and if that actually turns out to be a
problem for anyone, then it can always be changed as needed.
Thanks for the advice, folks! I was especially happy to see that no-one
said "no CDs here in [wherever country] ever use the format like 12:15,
because when people see that, the absolute first thing they think of is the
ratio of 12 to 15, or the fraction 12/15ths."
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
