YuE2-3B: pricing, features, alternatives

YuE2-3B is M·A·P's September 2026 music generator. The demo lives at map-yue2.github.io. Weights are on huggingface.co/m-a-p/YuE2-3B under CC BY-NC-4.0. The inference/code repo multimodal-art-projection/YuE is Apache-2.0, created 2025-01-23, Python. On 2026-09-11 GitHub listed 6,620 stars and 772 forks, last push 2026-09-10. The Hugging Face card the same day showed about 87 likes. r/LocalLLaMA posted the 3B drop on 2026-09-11 with a link to the card.

Compare MiniMax-Music3 if you wanted MiniMax's open music stack, or HyperFrames if you needed HTML-to-MP4 instead of a song model.

Key Features

Symbolic planning: default cot="full" writes melody plus chords as an editable ABC score, then synthesizes vocals and accompaniment. cot="melody" and cot="off" are documented.
Cover and agentic edit: supply ABC plus lyrics for a cover. The card documents multi-turn score/style/lyric edits; the demo walks The Last Train through 9 steps and 14 versions.
Local 24GB path: card says 48 kHz stereo on a 24GB NVIDIA GPU without quantization. A measured RTX 4090 full-CoT run was 71.04s generate for 214.85s audio at 11.18 GiB peak.
WildSongBench: YuE2 best-of-8 SongBench average 6.9632 vs Suno v5 6.8721 on 192 prompts (card tables, 2026-09-05 evaluation note on the demo site).

Limitation: weights are CC BY-NC-4.0, not a commercial Apache grant. 6,620 stars and 87 likes are heat signals, not an audit. The card says a technical report is still coming; cite YuE for now. Default listening VAE is YuE2-Vae; benchmark tables use YuE2-Vae-legacy.

Model Specifications

Spec	YuE2-3B (first-party, 2026-09-11)
Parameters	About 3.59B, 28 layers (demo). HF lists ~4B BF16.
License (weights)	CC BY-NC-4.0
License (YuE repo)	Apache-2.0
Weights	m-a-p/YuE2-3B
VAE	YuE2-Vae default; legacy for paper scores

Pricing

Piece	Price	Notes from first-party pages 2026-09-11
Weights	$0 to download	CC BY-NC-4.0. Non-commercial.
Code repo	$0	Apache-2.0. About 6,620 stars.
Hosted API	Not listed on the card	No Inference Provider deploy on 2026-09-11.

Getting Started

Use Linux, Python 3.10+, and a 24GB NVIDIA GPU with BF16.
hf download m-a-p/YuE2-3B yue2_infer-0.1.5-py3-none-any.whl --local-dir . then python -m pip install ./yue2_infer-0.1.5-py3-none-any.whl.
YuE2Pipeline.from_pretrained("m-a-p/YuE2-3B", device="cuda"), then pipe(style=..., lyrics=..., cot="full").
Save audio and artifacts (score.abc, tokens, latents).

First-party resource: the Hugging Face model card.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use YuE2-3B in a paid product?

Not under the weight license as written. CC BY-NC-4.0 is non-commercial. Confirm counsel before shipping.

Does Q4 fit in 8GB?

The r/LocalLLaMA thread pointed at audio-cpp/Yue2-3B-GGUF and audio.cpp dev. That is a third-party quant, not the official HF wheel.

Is this Suno?

No. It is an open checkpoint that the authors compare with Suno v5 on WildSongBench. Suno remains a hosted product.

Alternatives

MiniMax-Music3: MiniMax open music model plus API.
HyperFrames: HTML-to-MP4 for agents, not a song model.
Generate Image: stills, not audio.

Tips

Quote CC BY-NC-4.0, 3.59B, 24GB, and 6.9632 from pages checked 2026-09-11.
Keep cot="melody" for covers; do not assume it strips chord symbols.
Use YuE2-Vae for listening; YuE2-Vae-legacy only when reproducing the paper table.

Conclusion

YuE2-3B is the local music drop r/LocalLLaMA was pointing at: an editable score, then a full song, on a 24GB GPU. Start at the demo or the model card. If you needed MiniMax's API path, open MiniMax-Music3 instead.