ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Model

ACE-Step Framework

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:

  • 15ร— 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.

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