YuE2
What it is
An open music-generation model from a HKUST-led consortium that works the way musicians do: it first writes an editable symbolic score — ABC notation you can actually change — and then synthesises vocals and accompaniment from it. 3.6B parameters, trained on 346,000 hours of mostly CC0 and synthetic audio, with companion models for audio-to-lead-sheet transcription. The code is Apache 2.0; the weights on Hugging Face are CC-BY-NC — non-commercial, mind.
Featured in
Issue #12 — Chain of Custody · — the full issue has that week's other tools, reads, and big-lab releases.
More audio tools we've covered
- Whistle Speech-to-text in 16.9 MB: seven languages, word timestamps, runs on a plain CPU with no dependencies.
- RollTab A free iPhone app that autocompletes your piano playing in real time. Simon Edwardsson trained a 125M-parameter decoder-only transformer on a few hundred thousand MIDI files of classical piano — custom note tokens for pitch, onset delta, duration, and velocity — post-trained it with DPO judged by Gemini 3.5 Flash, and quantised it to INT8 Core ML, where it generates around 108 notes a second on an iPhone 15 from live MIDI input.