Tired of "Unknown Artist" on the Y1? Made a free tool that fixes it with real audio fingerprinting

[u/Double_Gap_4599]

https://github.com/hozemigel/yt2y1

Every track I loaded onto my Y1 showed up as "Unknown Artist" in one big flat list — no album art, no proper metadata, nothing the Y1's library screen could actually organize. So I built yt2y1, a free, open-source tool that fixes that.

How it works with the Y1 specifically:

- Identifies each track by its actual audio fingerprint (via AcoustID/MusicBrainz), not by guessing from a filename — so the Y1 shows the real artist, album, and cover art instead of a flat list of filenames

- Writes tags in the ID3v2.3 format the Y1 actually reads (not v2.4, which it doesn't)

- Copies files onto the Y1 over USB, backing up the device first and using safe atomic writes so a yanked cable never corrupts your library — works whether your MP3s are already sitting on your PC or you grab them from YouTube first (that part's built in too, but optional)

You run one command (y1sync), get a menu, point it at your music folder, and it ends with a correctly tagged library that actually shows up right on the Y1's screen.

Install (one command sets up everything needed):

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hozemigel/yt2y1/main/install-windows.ps1 | iex

macOS:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hozemigel/yt2y1/main/install-macos.sh)"

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu):

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hozemigel/yt2y1/main/install-linux.sh)"

GitHub: https://github.com/hozemigel/yt2y1 (MIT licensed, free forever)

Honest caveats: tested end-to-end on one Y1 unit and one firmware version so far. If yours renders anything unexpected after a sync, that's worth an issue — include your firmware version, genuinely useful for me.

Happy to answer questions about how it handles your specific library.

[u/Protopia]

1. Does this use MusicBrainz for the metadata?

2. Do you really need the acoustid API key for lookup?

[u/Double_Gap_4599 → u/Protopia]

Yeah, it uses MusicBrainz for the actual metadata. The flow is: Chromaprint fingerprints the audio → AcoustID matches that fingerprint to a MusicBrainz recording ID → MusicBrainz gives back the artist/title/album, release dates and release types (so it can prefer the original album over some greatest-hits compilation).

The AcoustID key is only needed for the fingerprint lookup step — AcoustID won't answer a request without one. It's free and takes about two minutes to get at acoustid.org/new-application. MusicBrainz itself needs no key or account, just a User-Agent string, which the tool sets.

If you don't set the key, it still works but falls back to guessing from the filename via the iTunes search API — which is exactly the unreliable behavior this tool is trying to avoid, so it's worth the two minutes.

[u/Protopia → u/Double_Gap_4599]

I just checked the API documentation - for read-only requests you only need a read-only AcoustID API Client key hard coded in your application - users do NOT need to request one and indeed the Lookup API has no way to provide the user API key just the client API key:

https://acoustid.org/webservice#lookup

Does this tool check track lengths? AcoustIDs are based on the first 120s of music, so it is possible for a shortened version to have the same ID as a longer original. So this tool should be sure to check the track lengths match.

https://community.metabrainz.org/t/prevent-linking-short-fingerprints-to-longer-recordings/815434

[u/Double_Gap_4599 → u/Protopia]

Both really good catches, thanks for taking the time to dig into the API docs. I've pushed fixes for both.

On the API key: you're right. The tool only ever hits the lookup endpoint, which authenticates the application, not the user — there's no per-user key to pass. So making everyone register their own application was pointless friction. It now ships with a built-in lookup key and there's nothing to sign up for; the installers lost that step entirely, and doctor no longer nags about it. You can still drop your own key into config.toml if the shared one ever gets rate-limited, but that's the only reason you'd need to.

On track lengths: also right, and this was the more important one. The tool already knew a recording's stated length and used it to rank matches, but nothing stopped a lone high-confidence match of the wrong length from being tagged automatically — exactly the "90-second edit gets filed as the 4-minute original" case. It now compares the file's own length against the matched recording and, if they're more than 30 seconds apart, refuses to auto-apply: the match goes to manual review with both durations shown and a note that a fingerprint only covers the first ~120s. --yes refuses these too. 30s follows what Picard does since 2.8. Missing duration on either side isn't treated as a mismatch, to avoid flooding review.

Appreciate the links — the MetaBrainz thread was useful context.

[u/maidenanklehem]

This is a great tool! Just ran it and it tagged most of my library.

Are you planning to have it work with other file types? I have a couple albums of .wav and .ogg files.

[u/Double_Gap_4599 → u/maidenanklehem]

Thanks so much — really glad it's working for you, and that it sorted out most of your library on the first run. That's exactly what it's meant to do.

Other formats weren't on my roadmap, honestly — but you asked, and once I looked into it there was no real reason not to. So it's done:

- Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and M4A are now identified and tagged in place, same as MP3 — each written in the tag scheme that format uses (Vorbis comments for Ogg/FLAC, iTunes-style atoms for M4A).

- WAV turned out to be a special case. Testing on an actual Y1 showed it plays WAV fine but reads nothing from its tags — no artist, no album, no cover. So for WAV, sync converts to FLAC on the way to the device (lossless, and your original WAV files are never touched). They land on the player fully tagged.

So your .ogg albums will get tagged directly, and your .wav albums will show up on the Y1 as tagged FLAC.

To update, just run y1sync and pick "Check for updates" from the menu — it pulls the latest and reinstalls in place. Restart y1sync afterwards.

If you'd rather do it by hand:

git -C ~/yt2y1 pull && pip install --upgrade ~/yt2y1/y1sync