Local AI Songwriting Studio for Apple Silicon — Lyrics + Style → A Full Song.
YuE2Mac is a native macOS desktop application that brings the open YuE2 music-generation model — ported to Apple MLX — directly to your Apple Silicon Mac. Type some lyrics, pick a style, and the app plans the arrangement, composes the melody, refines the sound, and renders a full 48 kHz stereo song — completely offline.
Powered by YuE2 (a Mixture-of-Transformers model) running at 8-bit on the Apple GPU, YuE2Mac requires no internet connection, no API keys, and nothing leaves your machine. Your lyrics and your songs stay on your Mac.
Original models & research: YuE project page · YuE on GitHub · MERT
Listed in awesome-YuE — the curated directory of the YuE / YuE2 ecosystem.
The whole studio was rebuilt around two modes, and every Tier-1 idea from the ecosystem analysis landed, plus a layout polish pass:
- Two modes — Lite (two steps and a big button) and Pro (the full studio), switched from the toolbar; your work follows you between modes.
- Queue — line up as many songs as you like; one renders at a time, with live stage chips (Load → Plan → Compose → Refine → Render → Save) and a tokens/s readout.
- Draft → Finish — render a fast 8-step preview, then press Finish at full quality to re-render the same take (saved tokens + seed) at 32 steps.
- Song Library — every song lands in its own timestamped folder with its score, seed and settings; search, replay, export M4A, take a new variation, or delete.
- ABC Score Studio — edit the score YuE2 planned for you, validate your edits, rewrite vocals to instrumental (the official recipe), and re-render with the same seed.
- Advanced sampling — temperature, top-p, top-k, repetition penalty, with one-click reset.
- Write with AI — on-device lyric drafting via Apple FoundationModels on Apple-Intelligence Macs (macOS 26+). Nothing downloads, nothing leaves your Mac.
- Style catalog — ~40 categorized style starters, chips in Lite and a browser in Pro, plus “Surprise me”.
- Help everywhere — every control explains itself: hover the ❓ for a tooltip, click it for a short card.
- Resizable split — drag the divider between the writing canvas and the controls column; each mode remembers your width, double-click resets it.
- Tidier chrome — the Lite/Pro switch sits on the left of the toolbar, everything else (library, appearance, about, settings) on the right; appearance now lives only in the toolbar.
- 🎚 Two Modes, One Click: A toolbar switch flips the whole studio between Lite (two steps and a big button — perfect for a first song) and Pro (queue, sampling controls, score editing, library tools). Your work follows you between modes.
- 🌸 Lyrics + Style → Song: Write your own lyrics or load a built-in sample set, describe the sound, and get a full song. On Apple-Intelligence Macs (macOS 26+), a Write with AI button drafts a full lyric sheet on-device — nothing leaves your Mac.
- 🎛 Style Catalog: A curated, categorized set of style starters (chips in Lite, a browser in Pro) — from Bossa Nova to Synthwave, with “Surprise me”.
- 🌹 Draft → Finish: Generate a fast 8-step preview, then press Finish at full quality — it reuses the exact same take (saved song tokens + seed) and only refines it at 32 steps.
- 📚 Song Library: Every song lands in its own timestamped folder with its seed, settings and score. Search, replay, export M4A, take a new variation, or delete — plus your old loose
.wavfiles are still listed. - ⏳ Queue: Queue as many songs as you like; one renders at a time with live stage chips (Load → Plan → Compose → Refine → Render → Save) and tokens/s readout. Queued jobs cancel instantly; stops are honestly labelled.
- 🎼 ABC Score Studio: The score YuE2 writes is saved next to every song. Edit it, validate it, make the song instrumental (the official Vocal→Ins recipe), or re-render with the same seed — all inside the app.
- 🧠 Model Version Choice: The installer pre-selects a model (8-bit / 4-bit / bf16) based on your Mac's RAM and spec, then downloads exactly that one.
- 🪗 Planning (COT): Full writes a chord-annotated chart, Melody only writes a melody outline, Off goes straight to audio for speed.
- 🎚 Advanced Sampling (Pro): Temperature, top-p, top-k and repetition penalty — mirroring the engine's generation config, with one-click reset.
- 🎹 Instrumental Mode: One switch injects instrumental, no vocals and strips lyrics to structure tags — taming the model's vocal bias. In Pro, the score editor can do the robust Vocal→Ins rewrite instead.
- ❓ Help Icons: Every control has an explanation icon (hover for a tooltip, click for a quick card).
- 🎨 Ambient Themes: Studio / Stage / Vinyl — animated ambient backgrounds that adapt with the UI.
- ⚡ Smart Resource Handling: The engine runs as a child process and is unloaded from memory the moment a song finishes, keeping your Mac responsive.
- 📦 Self-Contained, One-Button Setup: One press downloads the engine + model from Hugging Face, builds a private Python environment, and installs it all in the app's own folder — you never pick files or folders.
The app sets up its own Python environment and dependencies automatically. Beforehand you need:
- macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) or later.
- Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4/M4 Pro…) Mac.
- Homebrew: Provides the Python ABI used to bootstrap the app's private virtual environment. (If missing, the setup screen gives you the exact command.)
- Internet Connection: Only on first launch, to download the engine code, the MLX/numpy/tiktoken packages, and the model weights once. After that the app works fully offline.
- Build & run (see Building), or download the latest
.appfrom the Releases page. - On first launch, the Setup screen shows your Mac's spec (chip + RAM) and pre-selects a model version:
- 8-bit — best quality/size balance, recommended for 16 GB+.
- 4-bit — smallest, better for 8–12 GB Macs.
- bf16 — highest fidelity, needs 28 GB+.
- Press “Download & Install” — that's it. YuE2Mac automatically:
- builds a private Python virtual environment (
~/Library/Application Support/YuE2Mac/Python) and installsmlx,numpy,tiktoken; - downloads the YuE2 engine code and your chosen model weights from Hugging Face (
Models/<variant>/); - verifies everything, then switches you straight to the composer.
- builds a private Python virtual environment (
- Done — fully offline from then on.
First download size: the engine code is tiny, but the model weights are large — about 4.2 GB for the default 8-bit model (3.4 GB 4-bit, 7 GB bf16). It only downloads once.
Notarization note: like many local-LLM tools, the app may be blocked by Gatekeeper. If so, run:
xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/YuE2Mac.app
The toolbar switch at the top picks your mode:
- Lite — pick a vibe from the chips (or let Surprise me choose), write lyrics (or press Write with AI on supported Macs), and hit the big Generate Song button. Optionally flip on Quick preview for a fast draft you can finish later at full quality.
- Pro — everything above, plus: queue several songs at once (they run one at a time, each with live stage chips), model/planning pickers, quality (steps + draft toggle), advanced sampling (temperature / top-p / top-k / repetition penalty), song length, and a seed field.
After generating, every song lives in its own folder in the library (Output/<date> <title>/) with its WAV, ABC score, saved song project, and a song.json sidecar of settings. From the result panel or the library you can replay, finish a draft at full quality (same take, 32 steps), edit the ABC score and re-render, take a new variation, export M4A, or delete.
- Draft → Finish: Quick preview renders with 8 steps (≈4× faster). The take's semantic tokens and seed are saved, so Finish at full quality re-renders the same composition at 32 steps — no re-composing, no surprises.
- Queue: songs render one at a time; a queued job cancels instantly, a running one stops at the next step and is honestly labelled Stopped (never Failed).
- Style catalog: a curated, categorized set of ~40 starters (chips in Lite, full browser in Pro) — no AI, just ideas.
- Write with AI (macOS 26+ with Apple Intelligence): drafts a structured lyric sheet on-device via Apple's FoundationModels — the system model that ships with macOS as part of Apple Intelligence. No model is downloaded for this and no network is used — it is a different model from the song engine, which does download once from Hugging Face. Each section (verse / chorus / bridge / outro) is generated with its own guide so the small on-device model keeps sections distinct instead of repeating one hook. The button hides automatically on Macs without Apple Intelligence.
- Help icons (❓): each slider/switch shows a tooltip on hover and a short explainer card on click.
- Samples (lyrics): loads ready-made lyric sets, including an Instrumental only template.
- Instrumental: adds
instrumental, no vocalsto the prompt and keeps only the structural tags from your lyrics. In Pro, the score editor can instead rewrite the ABC directly (Vocal → Ins) — the official, most robust YuE2 recipe. - Score editing (Pro): every planned song saves its ABC score. The editor validates your edits (notes/bars/voices), warns when the structure changed a lot, and re-renders with the same seed — or a fresh one.
- Planning (COT): Full = plans chords + melody, Melody only = melody outline, Off = straight to audio (fastest, may lose the beat).
- CFG: how strictly the model follows your style prompt. Higher = more obedient, possibly less creative.
- Sampling (Pro): temperature (wildness), top-p/top-k (candidate cut-offs), repetition penalty (stops the model replaying a memorized song). Defaults mirror the engine's own config.
- Seed: same lyrics + same seed = the same song. Leave blank for a random take.
A real run was benchmarked on a base M4 MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM using the 8-bit engine with this input:
Style:
English, soft rock, 70s feel, smooth bass, electric piano, brushed drums
Lyrics:
[Verse] I took my time, I took the slow lane Learned to love the quiet rain [Chorus] I bloomed when nobody was watching Good things come late, and that's okay [Verse] All my once-upons grew roots at last I stopped replaying failed takes from the past [Chorus] I bloomed when nobody was watching Good things come late, and that's okay
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Model | YuE2-3B, 8-bit MLX |
| Memory used during generation | ~11.4 GB of the 16 GB system |
| Device | Apple M4 · 16 GB unified memory |
| Output | 48 kHz stereo WAV |
Because the engine runs as its own child process, all ~11.4 GB is released the moment the song finishes — nothing stays pinned in RAM, so your Mac doesn't stay laggy after a session.
All generation happens locally on your GPU. No telemetry, no cloud APIs.
| Location | Contents |
|---|---|
~/Library/Application Support/YuE2Mac/Python |
Isolated Python venv + pip packages (mlx, numpy, tiktoken). |
~/Library/Application Support/YuE2Mac/Scripts |
generate.py + the model modules from Hugging Face, plus the app's bundled yue2_pro.py add-on (draft/finish, sampling, saved takes). |
~/Library/Application Support/YuE2Mac/Models |
The chosen model weights (8-bit/4-bit/bf16), downloaded from Hugging Face. |
~/Library/Application Support/YuE2Mac/Output |
Your songs — one timestamped folder each (song.wav, song.abc, song.tokens.json, song.json). |
rm -rf /Applications/YuE2Mac.app
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/YuE2Macopen YuE2Mac.xcodeproj # in Xcode, hit Run
# or build & launch directly (no Xcode debugger, lower memory):
bash scripts/run_app.shContributions are welcome. To contribute: fork the repo, make a branch, commit with a clear message, and open a pull request. For bugs or feature requests, open an issue and include your macOS version and reproduction steps.
Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.
Logo by GUMO · https://www.instagram.com/gumoooo._/
Developed by arinltte · arinltte00@gmail.com