VoiceStudio — MLX-Audio Engine (Apple Silicon)
MLX-Audio (Blaizzy/mlx-audio) wraps 14+ TTS engines — Kokoro, CSM, Dia, Qwen3-TTS, Chatterbox, MeloTTS, OuteTTS, and more — behind a single adapter that runs on Apple's MLX framework. It is Apple Silicon only: the engine is not shipped on Linux, Windows, or Intel Macs, and a stray wheel on those platforms never reports as available (#390).
When to pick it
- You're on an M-series Mac and want small, fast models tuned for it.
- You want one of the specific hosted models (Kokoro for small multilingual, CSM for cloning, Qwen3-TTS for voice design, Dia for dialogue, …).
Setup
pip install mlx-audio
Then select the engine via Model Catalogue → Engines or
OMNIVOICE_TTS_BACKEND=mlx-audio.
Model selection
One backend hosts many models. The curated set:
| Key | Model | Niche |
|---|---|---|
kokoro (default) |
mlx-community/Kokoro-82M-bf16 |
small multilingual |
csm |
mlx-community/csm-1b-8bit |
voice cloning |
qwen3-tts |
mlx-community/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign-4bit |
voice design |
dia |
mlx-community/Dia-1.6B |
dialogue |
chatterbox |
mlx-community/Chatterbox-TTS-4bit |
expressive |
melotts |
mlx-community/MeloTTS-English-v3-MLX |
lightweight VITS |
outetts |
mlx-community/Llama-OuteTTS-1.0-1B-4bit |
LM-based |
Pick a model in the Model Catalogue → Engines curated picker
(#981) or set
OMNIVOICE_MLX_AUDIO_MODEL to either a curated key (kokoro) or any full
HF repo id. The env var overrides the persisted UI choice.
Behaviour notes
- Output is 24 kHz mono for most hosted models.
- Cloning works only with the
csmmodel — it is the only curated model confirmed to accept a reference clip. Other models silently ignore reference audio, so the engine reports cloning support only when CSM is selected (dub/batch jobs gate on this). - Voice design (text description → voice) is available through the Qwen3-TTS VoiceDesign model.
- Language support is per-model (Kokoro ~8 languages, others vary). An unsupported language for Kokoro produces a clear error naming what it does support (#977) — leave language on Auto or switch to a multilingual engine.
Platform notes
This engine is exempt from cross-platform parity as a platform-only capability behind explicit opt-in: it exists only where Apple's MLX runtime exists. On any other platform the engine picker shows it unavailable with the reason.
Troubleshooting
- Unavailable on an M-series Mac:
pip install mlx-audiointo VoiceStudio's Python environment; in a packaged app build, MLX's native libraries may fail to load — the engine reports unavailable rather than crashing. - Other issues: install/troubleshooting.md.
See also: benchmarks.md, languages.md, downloading-models.md, disk usage.