ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Model

Model Description

ACE-Step is a novel open-source foundation model for music generation that overcomes key limitations of existing approaches through a holistic architectural design. It integrates diffusion-based generation with Sana's Deep Compression AutoEncoder (DCAE) and a lightweight linear transformer, achieving state-of-the-art performance in generation speed, musical coherence, and controllability.

Key Features:

15× faster than LLM-based baselines (20s for 4-minute music on A100)
Superior musical coherence across melody, harmony, and rhythm
full-song generation, duration control and accepts natural language descriptions

Uses

Direct Use

ACE-Step can be used for:

Generating original music from text descriptions
Music remixing and style transfer
edit song lyrics

Downstream Use

The model serves as a foundation for:

Voice cloning applications
Specialized music generation (rap, jazz, etc.)
Music production tools
Creative AI assistants

Out-of-Scope Use

The model should not be used for:

Generating copyrighted content without permission
Creating harmful or offensive content
Misrepresenting AI-generated music as human-created

How to Get Started

see: https://github.com/ace-step/ACE-Step

Hardware Performance

| Device | 27 Steps | 60 Steps |

|---------------|----------|----------|

| NVIDIA A100 | 27.27x | 12.27x |

| RTX 4090 | 34.48x | 15.63x |

| RTX 3090 | 12.76x | 6.48x |

| M2 Max | 2.27x | 1.03x |

RTF (Real-Time Factor) shown - higher values indicate faster generation

Limitations

Performance varies by language (top 10 languages perform best)
Longer generations (>5 minutes) may lose structural coherence
Rare instruments may not render perfectly
Output Inconsistency: Highly sensitive to random seeds and input duration, leading to varied "gacha-style" results.
Style-specific Weaknesses: Underperforms on certain genres (e.g. Chinese rap/zh_rap) Limited style adherence and musicality ceiling
Continuity Artifacts: Unnatural transitions in repainting/extend operations
Vocal Quality: Coarse vocal synthesis lacking nuance
Control Granularity: Needs finer-grained musical parameter control

Ethical Considerations

Users should:

Verify originality of generated works
Disclose AI involvement
Respect cultural elements and copyrights
Avoid harmful content generation

Model Details

Developed by: ACE Studio and StepFun

Model type: Diffusion-based music generation with transformer conditioning

License: Apache 2.0

Resources:

Citation

@misc{gong2025acestep,
  title={ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Model},
  author={Junmin Gong, Wenxiao Zhao, Sen Wang, Shengyuan Xu, Jing Guo}, 
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/ace-step/ACE-Step}},
  year={2025},
  note={GitHub repository}
}

Acknowledgements

This project is co-led by ACE Studio and StepFun.

ACE-Step/ACE-Step-v1-3.5B