A way to find the date a Project was created

[JamesDebono]

It seems like a very simple thing, but after my exhaustive efforts described below, contacting support, posting in various Ableton user groups and consulting Ableton certified trainers,
I have come to the conclusion that it is actually impossible to find the exact date that you started a project. (for project organization purposes)

Here's what I have tried:

The first obvious choice would be to check the metadata of the .als by going to properties, then details (in windows). There is no program level data, only OS level data such as "Date Created" and "Date Modified". The problem with these are that "Date Created" resets when the file is moved to a new drive and is often a later date than "Date Modified" if you moved it recently which is obviously not useful. "Date Modified" shows you the date that the project was last changed and then saved which is also not useful.

Going deeper on the .als it is possible to unzip it using 7zip or WinRar which reveals an .xml file and then open it in a text editor which shows all of the code that makes up the project but after doing a bunch of searches I couldn't find any information related to a creation date.

The next option was to look in the "Ableton Project Info" folder which you would think would contain useful "info" about your "Ableton Project" such as the date created but it does not. It contains a .ico (Icon Image) and a .cfg named "Project8_1.cfg". Opening this in a text editor reveals something promising. Text that reads "C r e a t i o n D a t e " but there are no actual numbers to represent a date. I opened the file in a text editor that has a hex viewer to see if the square characters could be decoded into a date but there was just a string of numbers "00 11 1d 00 00" which is consistent in every project. After comparing multiple files from projects across different dates, it seems that the only data in the file that changes is the build version of Live. So it's as if Ableton had planned to add Creation Date metadata but never implemented it.

There is also sometimes a "Cache.cfg" file which contains a log of back ups which do have dates on them but they are the date which the backup was created. The problem is that Live does not always create backups and it impossible to know if the first backup was created on the creation date of the project. At first I thought only Live 10 projects made backups because my older Live 9 projects did not have backups.
I created some new projects to test it and they did not create backups so I don't know what triggers the creation of a backup.
So backups and there dates saved into their file names cannot be used to find the project creation date.

I also looked into the metadata in project "Samples" folder. It seems Live does not write any data to the "Origin" section of audio metadata.
Even if it did, not every project contains audio files and they are not always recorded on the creation date of the project.

So I feel pretty confident that it is actually impossible to find the creation date of an Ableton Project. If you have ever moved your projects to a different drive then you will never be able to find out when you started them

I would like this to be user available information on some level somewhere. Would make sense to show the date created in the "Manage Files" window inside live

If there is a way to do this that you know, Please prove me wrong

[skarvhylsa]

I've also been looking for a way to find the original creation date for all the projects I've saved over the years, but unfortunately I've come to the same conclusion as you I had to move all my files from my old computer when it died so all projects I have that are over 2 years old have the same creation and last modified date.. I really wish I could organize all my projects after exact date (or even just by year)

[jonljacobi]

Not trying to be a wise ass, but putting a date in the name is something I learned a long time ago. It's simply the way file systems work. Use the info text if you don't want to put it in the project name itself.

[DevPossum]

This is an imperfect solution, but I built an app for previewing Ableton projects and you can sort projects by Live version, which is better than system date created if you've transferred all of your projects to a new drive and it's wiped the original creation date: https://www.liveprojectlauncher.com/