ACE-Step 1.5: MIT-licensed song generator that runs on consumer GPUs
ACE Studio and StepFun released ACE-Step 1.5, an MIT-licensed text-to-music model (LM planner + Diffusion Transformer) that generates full songs with lyrics in 50+ languages in seconds on consumer hardware, with covers, repainting and LoRA fine-tuning; a 4B-DiT XL series followed on 2026-04-02.
Key facts
- Songs from 10 s to 10 min; under 2 s per song on an A100, under 10 s on an RTX 3090
- Runs in under 4 GB VRAM with offload (XL needs >=12 GB)
- LoRA personalization from about 8 songs in ~1 hour on a 12 GB GPU
- License: MIT; weights on Hugging Face (ACE-Step/Ace-Step1.5)
- ACE-Step 1.5 XL (4B DiT; base/sft/turbo) released 2026-04-02
What happened
The successor to 2025's ACE-Step v1 (3.5B) splits generation into a language-model "planner" that writes a full song blueprint and a Diffusion Transformer that renders audio, aligned with reinforcement learning that needs no external reward model. It ships with cover generation, repainting, vocal-to-backing-track conversion, stem separation and LoRA training, and supports Mac, AMD, Intel and CUDA.
The exact launch day (2026-01-28) comes from secondary coverage; Hugging Face repos were created on 2026-01-23 and the tech report was submitted on 2026-01-31.
Why it matters
It made near-commercial song generation practical on laptops and gaming GPUs under a permissive license, the open alternative to Suno/Udio in the year the commercial services moved to licensed data. The authors claim quality above most commercial models (not independently verified).
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Models
- ACE-Step 1.5 (incl. 1.5 XL) ACE Studio & StepFun · current
Related events
- MiniMax open-sources Music 3.0, a five-minute full-song generator ★★★
- YuE2: open-weights song model that plans an editable score first, claims top WildSongBench score over Suno v5 ★★★
Sources (4)
- codeGitHub: ace-step/ACE-Step-1.5
- paperTech report: ACE-Step 1.5 (arXiv 2602.00744)
- codeHugging Face: ACE-Step/Ace-Step1.5
- officialProject page
id: 2026-01-28-ace-step-1-5 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline