Telisha Jones writes the lyrics, Suno sings them. The project signed a reported multimillion deal with Hallwood Media in September 2025 and reached No. 1 on Billboard's R&B Digital Song Sales chart. The Decoder
Monthly Spotify listeners for a 70s-style rock band that did not exist. In July 2025 a self-described spokesperson told the press it was made with Suno, then admitted he had never been part of the project. The band's own bio now calls it a synthetic project made with AI. Press Gazette
More than half of all daily uploads to Deezer are AI generated, roughly 90,000 tracks a day, up from about 10% in January 2025. Deezer plans to remove AI tracks that get no streams for six months. TechCrunch
Suno is the easiest way to get a song. It is also a monthly bill, a terms-of-service page that can change, a model that can be retired, and a training-data lawsuit you have no say in. A local pipeline flips that. The weights sit on your SSD, the workflow is a JSON file you can version, and the same seed gives you the same take next year. The trade-off is that you become the engineer: you pick the model, you watch the VRAM, and you read the licenses. The rest of this post is about making that trade-off worth it.
Two years ago, local music generation meant 47-second instrumental loops. Today there are several models that write a full song with vocals from a lyrics sheet and a style description. Most of them ship as official ComfyUI templates: open the template browser, pick the audio tab, and the workflow downloads its own weights.
| Model | In ComfyUI | Vocals | Length | VRAM | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACE-Step 1.5 | Native, since Feb 2026 (docs) | Yes, 50+ languages | 10 s to 10 min | Under 4 GB for the DiT alone | MIT |
| ACE-Step 1.5 XL | Official templates, April 2026 | Yes | 10 s to 10 min | 12 GB with offload, 20 GB without | MIT |
| YuE2-3B | Native, Sept 2026 (PR #16250), text-to-music and cover templates | Yes, English and Mandarin | Longest demo 5:00 | ~11 GB peak on a 4090, 24 GB recommended | CC BY-NC 4.0 |
| MiniMax Music 3 | Native template, Aug 2026 | Yes | Up to 5 min | Under 24 GB at full precision, 8 GB with layer streaming | Community commercial with terms |
| HeartMuLa-oss-3B | Custom nodes (FL-HeartMuLa, HeartMuLa_ComfyUI) | Yes, multilingual | 4 min default | ~8 GB in 4-bit, ~12 GB in bf16 | Apache 2.0 |
| DiffRhythm 2 | Custom node (ComfyUI_DiffRhythm2, not updated since Nov 2025) | Yes | 210 s default | Not stated | Apache 2.0 |
| Stable Audio 3 | Native, day 0, May 2026 (docs) | No, instrumental and SFX | 2 min (Small), ~6 min (Medium) | Small-SFX runs on CPU | Community gated |
Fast enough to treat like a slot machine. The authors claim under 10 seconds per full song on an RTX 3090. They also say outright that you can use the output commercially, with no revenue cap and no credit line required. A small Qwen3 language model plans the song structure before the diffusion model renders it, which helps the verses and choruses land where your lyrics say they should.
Released in September and merged into ComfyUI two days later. The longest official demo runs a full five minutes, and the cover mode can restyle an existing melody. A 3.6-minute song takes about 71 seconds on a 4090. The catch is the license: CC BY-NC, so anything you make with it is non-commercial.
Open weights since August, with an official ComfyUI template that downloads about 15 GB. It writes full songs with vocals up to five minutes long, from lyrics plus a structured description of the arrangement. The model card says it fits under 24 GB at full precision, or in 8 GB if you stream the language model layer by layer. Commercial use is allowed, with conditions covered in track 06.
Switched to Apache 2.0 in January and runs in about 8 GB when quantized. Its paper describes an audio watermark for provenance, although the open-source release does not mention one.
The HeartMuLa team put the same English prompt through their model and three competitors: ACE-Step v1, DiffRhythm and YuE v1, not the newer ACE-Step 1.5 or YuE2 from the table above. These are the files from their demo page, so expect the comparison to favour HeartMuLa. It still shows how far vocal clarity and song structure differ between models given identical input.
Let's make one. Say you want a late-night synth-pop singer called Mara Vey: a slightly melancholy voice, neon-and-rain aesthetic, songs about night buses and missed calls. One good track is not enough. To feel like an artist she needs a recognisable voice across songs, the same face on every cover, and a music video where her lips move with the lyrics. In ComfyUI that becomes six stages, each one a workflow you can save and rerun.
Music models take two inputs: a style description and lyrics with section markers. The markers do more work than people expect. A [chorus] tag is how the model knows to lift the energy and repeat the hook, and an [instrumental] break gives your video editor room to breathe. Generate eight takes with different seeds, keep the one where the hook sticks, and write down that seed. That is now Mara's voice.
Lip-sync models listen to the audio you give them. Feed them the full mix and the kick drum makes the mouth twitch. Run the song through the official audio_melbandroformer_audio_separation template first and drive the video with the vocal stem only, then put the full mix back on in the edit. Stems also let you swap the instrumental, or run the vocal through a voice conversion node like Seed-VC to keep her timbre consistent across albums.
style: synth-pop, 2010s, female vocal, breathy, intimate, analog pads, gated reverb drums, 104 bpm, A minor, melancholic lyrics: [verse] Night bus hums a minor key Your name lights up, then lets me be [pre-chorus] I count the stops instead of sheep [chorus] Call me back before the morning Neon rain without a warning [instrumental] [verse] ...
The video models in stage 05 animate a reference image, so whatever face you pick here becomes the artist. Generate one portrait you love, then use Qwen-Image-Edit to turn it into a character sheet: front, three-quarter, profile, two outfits, one lighting setup. Every album cover and every video clip starts from that sheet. u/ExportErrorMusic's write-up in the next section makes the same point.
No local model renders a four-minute music video in one go. Wan2.2-S2V extends in steps of about 4.8 seconds, MiniMax H3 produces roughly 15-second clips. So you slice the vocal stem into lines, render one clip per line with the character sheet as reference, and add some B-roll from a plain image-to-video model for the instrumental parts. The InfiniteTalk music template is the easiest place to start.
If you live in the EU, the UK, the US or South Korea, leave MiniMax H3 out. Its community license excludes those regions for any use, and Comfy's Professional licence starts at $5,000 a month. Wan2.2-S2V, InfiniteTalk and HuMo are all Apache 2.0.
What the credits would look like if you followed the walkthrough above. This track does not exist; I did not render it.
- Words
- Written by a human. Track 06 explains why.
- Vocals, music
- ACE-Step 1.5, seed kept in the workflow file
- Stems
- MelBandRoFormer
- Face, cover
- Qwen-Image-Edit character sheet, five reference angles
- Video
- Wan2.2-S2V for the singing shots, image-to-video for B-roll
- Edit
- DaVinci Resolve
- Hardware
- One desktop, one GPU, no API keys
Most of the AI music videos that go viral on r/StableDiffusion still use Suno for the song and a local model only for the visuals. In the ones below, the audio was generated locally too.
A fully local music video on an RTX 5060 Ti, a mid-range card. The song comes from YuE2, the visuals are 8 to 10 second MiniMax H3 clips, and everything was cut together in Blender. Posted as "Minimax H3 + Yue 2 = New Headcanon". It shows that you do not need a 5090 to get here.
A song about the experience of using ComfyUI itself, made in ComfyUI. HeartMuLa for the track, Z-Image Turbo for stills, LTX-2 for motion, and an upscale pass at the end. The lyrics were drafted with ChatGPT, so not every step was local. The lyrics are, in the author's own words, vulgar. Anyone who has fought a missing custom node at 2 a.m. will relate.
Stock 8-bit YuE2 for the song, vocals split with BS-RoFormer, and the clean stem fed to H3 for lip-sync at 1152×640, 24 fps. The same trick as stage 03, with BS-RoFormer instead of MelBandRoFormer.
Open thread →ACE-Step 1.5 sings, HuMo animates the singer. Built on Thalion7's workflow on Civitai, which has more than 800 downloads.
Open thread →Posted a week after ACE-Step 1.5 landed in ComfyUI. Song and video both made locally, with LTX-2 for the visuals.
Open thread →Uses YuE2's cover mode with only native ComfyUI nodes, and shares the workflow in the thread.
Open thread →A practical write-up for the video side: character reference sheets first, and a warning that passing an audio reference bloats VRAM usage dramatically, although the lip-sync was worth it. The thread does not say how the song itself was made.
Open thread →ace-step-studio wraps the model in a Suno-style interface and calls ComfyUI for the cover art. Good if you want the pipeline without looking at nodes.
Open thread →These are the demo files published by the model authors and the preview attached to ComfyUI's official template. They are best cases, not typical runs, so treat them as the ceiling of what each model can do.
Distorted guitars and a shouted chorus. A good stress test for whether the vocals survive a dense mix.
Shows off the multilingual side. Mara Vey could release a Japanese single without changing the workflow.
Cowbell, 808s and chopped vocals.
The 4B version. Listen to how the chorus opens up compared to the base model.
A public-domain melody restyled into metal. This is what the cover template does with your own song.
The preview the ComfyUI team attached to the official template, made with its default settings.
ACE-Step 1.5 runs in under 4 GB and HeartMuLa fits in about 8 GB when quantized. You can produce a full album and its cover art. Lip-synced video will be slow or out of reach.
ACE-Step 1.5 XL with offload, YuE2, and short video clips. u/Darkseal made the AudioChef video above with MiniMax H3 on an RTX 5060 Ti, one 8 to 10 second clip at a time, over several days.
Everything in this post at a comfortable pace. MiniMax Music 3 fits at full precision. MiniMax H3's pruned checkpoints are 16 to 40 GB on disk and the full one is 66 GB, so plan for SSD space as much as for VRAM.
ACE-Step gives you a new take in seconds, so you can audition dozens of seeds for a single song. YuE2 needs a bit over a minute per song on a 4090. The video is where the time goes: u/Darkseal wrote that the AudioChef video took a few days of rendering clips before the edit could start. Plan the video as the bulk of the project.
Running a model on your own machine means nobody can see what you make. It does not mean you can sell what you make. Each model carries its own license, and those licenses are much less alike than the "open weights" label suggests.
| Tool | Can you sell the output? | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| ACE-Step 1.5 | Yes | MIT, and the authors explicitly allow commercial use. They say the training data is licensed, royalty-free or synthetic, without listing it. |
| YuE2 | No | CC BY-NC 4.0. Great for demos and fan projects, not for Spotify. |
| MiniMax Music 3 | With terms | Free commercial use, but a product or service using the model must show "MiniMax-Music3" in its interface, and companies above $20M yearly revenue need written permission. No regional exclusions. |
| HeartMuLa | Yes | Apache 2.0. The paper describes an audio watermark; the open-source release does not mention one. |
| Stable Audio | Under $1M | Stability Community License: free below $1M yearly revenue. |
| MiniMax H3 | Region locked | The community license excludes the EU, the UK, the US and South Korea for any use, including outputs. Elsewhere it is free under $20M yearly revenue with a "Powered by MiniMax H3" credit. Comfy sells a Professional licence from $5,000 a month. |
| Wan2.2-S2V, InfiniteTalk, HuMo | Yes | Apache 2.0. The safe choice for lip-sync if you are in one of H3's excluded regions. |
| Seed-VC | Check | The upstream project is GPL-3.0. That covers the code, but read it before you build a product around it. |
Every stage of an AI artist now runs on one desktop: the voice, the band, the face and the video. The best examples above did not need the biggest cards. Their makers locked a character early, separated the vocals before lip-sync, and spent most of their time on the edit. Open ComfyUI, load the ACE-Step 1.5 template, and write the first verse yourself.
ACE-Step 1.5 in ComfyUI →