YuE2 is a wild, local AI‑generated music that’s really close to, or even better than, Suno v5
So I finally found something worth sharing. YuE2-3B by M-A-P (Multimodal Art Projection) is an open-source music generator that makes full songs — vocals, instruments, the whole thing — and according to WildSongBench it actually outperforms Suno v5. YuE2 best-of-8 scores 6.9632 vs Suno's 6.8721. On a real benchmark, not marketing fluff.
You give it lyrics + a style description, it gives you back a 48 kHz stereo track. Around 71 seconds for a 3.6-minute song on an RTX 4090. Runs fine on my 5060 Ti 16GB too. ([YuE2] Completed: 331.6s audio in 334.2s)
Why it's different
YuE2 doesn't just vomit audio. It actually plans the music first using symbolic scores — melody and chords in ABC notation — then renders that into sound. That's a huge deal for control.
cot="full" — melody + chords, best for original songs
cot="melody" — melody only, great for covers
cot="off" — direct generation without planning
You can also feed it an existing song, transcribe the melody with SheetSage2, and remake it in a new style. Or use the agentic editing loop to ask for changes like "make this jazzier" or "add a sax solo" and get a new render.
Links
My Gradio UI: https://github.com/inquisitor075/YuE2_Gradio_UI (Tell me if something is broken...)
Official YuE2-3B model: https://huggingface.co/m-a-p/YuE2-3B
Main YuE repo: https://github.com/m-a-p/YuE
A little music: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj9DXs9RBsldWt3tiuUrTPw
My interface
I got tired of running Python scripts every time, so I threw together a simple Gradio web UI. It has:
separate style and lyrics inputs
CoT mode selector
seed + CFG controls
audio player
tabs for ABC score, lyrics, style prompt, and generation info
auto-saves all artifacts to
outputs/
Requirements: Linux or WSL2, Python 3.10+, NVIDIA GPU with 16GB+ VRAM. The model is about 10GB in BF16, peak VRAM usage is roughly 11–14GB.
Example style prompt
Crushing, dense heavy metal with a dark medieval horror atmosphere — slow-burning, weighty riffs and a relentless, driving groove, closer to classic heavy metal than power metal. Deep, aggressive male vocals delivered with raw grit and force, no theatrical drawn-out phrasing — snarled, punchy, and direct. Massively layered distorted guitars in Drop C tuning, running through high-gain tube amps with a tight noise gate: thick palm-muted chugging, crushing power-chord walls, and a melodic lead weaving dark folk-flavored hooks over the top. A huge, growling distorted bass locked to the kick, pushing a crushing low-end. Brutal, hard-hitting drums with a heavy straight-ahead groove, thunderous snare, and aggressive double-kick accents. Dark medieval horror mood: tolling church bells ringing out over the mix, a distant pipe organ drone, creaking coffin wood and rattling chains, wide immersive stereo with a heavy, crushing low-end and a slightly lo-fi, dusty texture. 180 BPM, A minor. Full, live, heavily layered, and menacing — a zombie inquisitor rising from the grave.
Example Lyrics
[Verse]
In a black robe, a cross upon his chest,
The Inquisitor deals his righteous doom.
Bonfires blaze, a scream that finds no rest,
The faithless burn — consigned to the tomb.
[Verse]
But death came, as death comes to all,
Lowered into the earth, into the cold clay.
Worms and rot — a new home, a final fall,
Yet he would not submit, and rose from decay.
[Chorus]
The dead Inquisitor rose from the grave,
Who's there at the village edge... he walks, unblessed.
He who burned the witches is now the knave,
The zombie Inquisitor shall find no rest.
[Verse]
He seeks the ones he himself once punished,
He wanders on, his path not chosen in vain.
The cross upon his chest has long since vanished,
Yet still he walks — becoming a bane.
[Chorus]
The dead Inquisitor rose from the grave,
Who's there at the village edge... he walks, unblessed.
He who burned the witches is now the knave,
The zombie Inquisitor shall find no rest.
[Bridge]
Fate's grim smile — he walks, he roams, he rots,
You burned the unclean — now you share their lots.
The grave will not hold him, the earth will not take him back,
There is no place for him — the final battle attacks.
[Chorus]
The dead Inquisitor rose from the grave,
Who's there at the village edge... he walks, unblessed.
He who burned the witches is now the knave,
The zombie Inquisitor shall find no rest.
[Outro]
He wanders... he wanders...
The zombie Inquisitor... wanders through the world...
Here’s what I’ve got!
Worth checking out if you're into local AI audio. This is the closest thing to Suno I've seen that actually runs on your own hardware.
And what a wonderful opportunity to create a cover of the song in the mode "Melody"