Local generation
MLX on Apple Silicon. Nothing uploaded, nothing metered.
05 — Mac app · AI music/On the App Store
LocalMusic AI
I ported the model stack to Swift and MLX and put it behind a native Mac app. It spent a week in the top three music apps on the Mac App Store.
- Peak rank
- Top 3
- Price
- Free
- Runs on
- macOS 15+
- Engine
- MLX
Role
Swift port, app, App Store release
Year
2026
Stack
- Swift
- MLX
- ACE-Step 1.5
- macOS 15
ACE-Step, rewritten in Swift, shipped on the App Store
What it is
A native Mac studio for AI music that never talks to a server. Full songs up to five minutes with vocals and lyrics, instrumentals across every genre, BPM and key and time signature controls, style tags, a lyrics editor with structure tags, stem separation, an audio editor and a video generator.
Everything you make is yours commercially, with no attribution and no licensing fee, because nothing about the generation involves anyone else's infrastructure.
The port
The web studios I had built ran ACE-Step 1.5 through Python. For a Mac app that had to pass review and feel native, that was the wrong shape. So I took the same model and moved the stack to Swift on Apple's MLX framework — Apple Silicon doing the inference directly, no Python runtime bundled underneath, no localhost server pretending to be an app.
It is the same model behind ACE-Step UI. The difference is that this one installs like software your parents could install.
What happened at launch
It reached the top three music apps on the Mac App Store and held there for a week. A free, local, no-account music generator turned out to be a category people were waiting for.
What is in it
Full control
BPM, key, time signature, steps, seed, duration.
Lyrics editor
Structure tags and a format assistant.
Stems and video
Separate the mix, or cut a video against the track.
