Music models that run on 256 GB

4 models with published weights that fit in 256 GB — a Mac Studio with 256. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 274 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

A Mac Studio at the top of its configuration, or a serious machine. Almost everything openly published fits, including the large mixtures of experts. At this point the constraint is no longer whether the model loads but whether it generates fast enough to be worth waiting for.

Models that compose and render music from a description. They are priced per generation or per second of audio rather than per token. The question that decides whether you can use one commercially is not the price but the terms: makers differ sharply on who owns the output and whether it may be sold, and that is on the maker's page, not in the rate card.

• YuE2-3BMultimodal Art Projection3.6B≈2.4 GB at 4-bit
• ACE-Step-v1-3.5BACE-Step3.5B≈2.3 GB at 4-bit
• musicgen-melodyfacebook1.6B≈1.0 GB at 4-bit
• musicgen-smallAI at Meta0.6B≈0.4 GB at 4-bit

Wider