31-language text-to-speech, ~x100 realtime on Apple Silicon.
Native MLX port of Supertone/supertonic-3,
runs the full flow-matching + classifier-free-guidance pipeline (DurationPredictor →
TextEncoder → 24-block VectorEstimator (5 Euler steps) → 10-block Vocos vocoder)
without ONNX, CoreML or any C++ runtime — only MLX + NumPy.
Install
The package isn't on PyPI yet — install directly from this gitea source
repository (or from the local checkout):
Runtime dependencies are just mlx, numpy, and huggingface_hub (the
last for the one-line weight download). On first use the ~ 400 MB weight
bundle is downloaded from
ambassadia/supertonic-3-mlx
into your Hugging Face cache.
One-shot quickstart + sanity test
A zero-config end-to-end test script ships with the repo. Clone the repo,
run the script, and it will create a fresh venv, install everything,
version-check MLX (with an optional auto-upgrade), download the weights
and synthesise an utterance into hello.wav:
bash
1git clone https://github.com/ambassadia/supertonic-3-mlx.git
2cd supertonic-3-mlx
3./setup_and_test.sh # en F1, default text4./setup_and_test.sh fr F2 "Bonjour."# custom lang / voice / text
Re-runs reuse the venv and the cached weights — second invocation is
~ 20 ms warm load + ~ 30 ms per generate.
Quickstart (after install)
python
1from supertonic_3_mlx import Pipeline
23pipe = Pipeline.from_pretrained("ambassadia/supertonic-3-mlx")4wav = pipe.generate("Hello world from Apple Silicon.", voice="F1", lang="en")56# wav is a 1-D numpy.float32 array at 44.1 kHz7import soundfile as sf
8sf.write("hello.wav", wav, pipe.sample_rate)
Audio samples
Six languages, mix of male / female voices, mix of short and long utterances —
all generated by the MLX pipeline at the wall times reported below.
EN · F1 · 2.79 s —
"Hello world from Apple Silicon. Supertonic 3 runs at one hundred times real time."
EN · M1 · 3.90 s —
"A gentle breeze moved through the open window while the children, still half-asleep, listened to the distant sound of the harbour bells."
FR · F2 · 3.41 s —
"Bonjour, ceci est un test de synthèse vocale en français. Le modèle gère trente-et-une langues sur une puce M4."
DE · M2 · 3.69 s —
"Guten Morgen. Dieses Modell läuft komplett auf Apple Silicon, ohne ONNX und ohne CoreML, in reinem MLX."
JA · F3 · 1.46 s —
"こんにちは。これはアップルシリコン上でMLXを使ったテストです。"
ES · M3 · 2.86 s —
"Hola, esto es una prueba de síntesis de voz en español ejecutada en tiempo real sobre Apple Silicon."
Benchmarks (Apple M4, FP32, median of 3)
Sample
Duration
MLX wall
RTF
ONNX SDK
Speedup
EN · F1 · short
2.79 s
36.6 ms
x76
1005 ms
28 ×
EN · M1 · long
3.90 s
38.4 ms
x102
1356 ms
35 ×
FR · F2
3.41 s
37.9 ms
x90
1196 ms
32 ×
DE · M2
3.69 s
38.1 ms
x97
1314 ms
35 ×
JA · F3
1.46 s
32.1 ms
x46
848 ms
26 ×
ES · M3
2.86 s
37.0 ms
x77
1002 ms
27 ×
Raw numbers are in bench_results.csv (regenerable via
a private development monorepo; this repository ships the consolidated release artefacts only).
Multi-machine comparison
Same French sentence
("Un jour, Isaac Newton se promène dans son jardin quand une pomme lui tombe sur la tête. Eurêka, j'ai trouvé la loi de la gravitation !"),
4 s of audio, median of 5 warm runs, MLX FP32:
Hardware
Wall
RTF
ms / s audio
Notes
Mac Studio M3 Ultra (80 GPU cores, 96 GB)
45.8 ms
x88
11.3
best on this test
MacBook Air M4 (10 GPU cores, 16 GB)
86.7 ms
x47
21.1
reference consumer device
MacBook Air M4 — CoreML (mlpackage, CPU + NE)
303.5 ms
x27
37.7
upstream CoreML build
MacBook Air M4 — ONNX SDK (pip install supertonic)
~1200 ms
~x3
~350
upstream reference Python SDK
The MLX path is ~ 1.78× faster than the CoreML build on the same M4 hardware
(MLX 21 ms / s of audio vs CoreML 38 ms / s of audio), and ~ 35–40× the
ONNX SDK reference. Memory footprint on M3 Ultra is 750 MB active /
844 MB peak GPU memory; the M4 footprint is similar since the model size is
fixed. The wall on small-utterance inputs is dispatch-bound (24 attention +
ConvNeXt blocks × 5 Euler steps + the 10-block vocoder all run in ~ 45 ms
on the Ultra); the M3 Ultra's 8× extra GPU cores buy ~ 2× wall because
the workload doesn't fill them.
Cold load: 15 ms from the local safetensors snapshot, ~ 17 s on first
from_pretrained from the Hub (downloads 379 MB of weights via
hf_transfer).
Reference comparison: the CoreML build of the same model on the same hardware
runs at ~x27 realtime. The MLX port is ~2-4× faster end-to-end while
remaining bit-identical to the ONNX Runtime reference on the vocoder
(cosine 1.00) and at cosine ≥ 0.98 on the full estimator output.
Voices
10 preset voices — five female (F1–F5) and five male (M1–M5). The
voice_styles/ directory contains both style_ttl (50×256 latent style for
the audio path) and style_dp (8×16 style for the duration head) for each
voice. Pass the voice name as the voice= kwarg to Pipeline.generate.
Languages
31 languages supported. Pass the ISO 639-1 code as the lang= kwarg:
enfrdeesitptjakozhruplnltrarhivithidcsrohueldasvfinoheukbghrsk.
Architecture (short)
Four sub-models, all in weights/*.safetensors:
Sub-model
Role
Params
Size
vector_estimator
24-block CFG flow-matching velocity
~64 M
256 MB
text_encoder
Character → 256-D text embedding
~9 M
36 MB
duration_predictor
Text → seconds
~1 M
3.5 MB
vocoder
Latent (B,144,T) → 44.1 kHz wav
~25 M
101 MB
The pipeline runs exactly 5 Euler steps with classifier-free guidance
(4×cond − 3×uncond). This schedule is trained-in: reducing the step count
or disabling CFG produces an essentially uncorrelated waveform (verified
empirically — see the bench_n_steps.py script in the source repo).
Loading from a local snapshot
Three layouts are auto-detected by Pipeline.from_pretrained:
Hugging Face repo id (e.g. "ambassadia/supertonic-3-mlx") — auto-download
Local path containing weights/ (this layout) — fastest cold-load
Local path containing onnx/ (upstream snapshot) — converts at load time
License
This release combines two artefact classes under two distinct licenses:
Model weights (weights/*.safetensors) — BigScience Open RAIL-M.
See LICENSE for the full text. The Attachment A use
restrictions are reproduced below and apply to all downstream use of the
model and of generated audio.
Port code (src/supertonic_3_mlx/) — Apache License 2.0. See
LICENSE-CODE.
See NOTICE for the modifications statement and the upstream
attribution.
OpenRAIL-M Attachment A — use restrictions
You agree not to use the model or derivatives:
(a) In any way that violates any applicable national, federal, state, local or
international law or regulation.
(b) For the purpose of exploiting, harming or attempting to exploit or harm
minors in any way.
(c) To generate or disseminate verifiably false information and/or content
with the purpose of harming others.
(d) To generate or disseminate personal identifiable information that can be
used to harm an individual.
(e) To generate or disseminate information and/or content (e.g. images, code,
posts, articles), and place the information and/or content in any context
(e.g. bot generating tweets) without expressly and intelligibly disclaiming
that the information and/or content is machine generated.
(f) To defame, disparage or otherwise harass others.
(g) To impersonate or attempt to impersonate (e.g. deepfakes) others
without their consent.
(h) For fully automated decision making that adversely impacts an individual's
legal rights or otherwise creates or modifies a binding, enforceable obligation.
(i) For any use intended to or which has the effect of discriminating against
or harming individuals or groups based on online or offline social behavior or
known or predicted personal or personality characteristics.
(j) To exploit any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons based
on their age, social, physical or mental characteristics, in order to materially
distort the behavior of a person pertaining to that group in a manner that
causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or
psychological harm.
(k) For any use intended to or which has the effect of discriminating against
individuals or groups based on legally protected characteristics or categories.
(l) To provide medical advice and medical results interpretation.
(m) To generate or disseminate information for the purpose to be used for
administration of justice, law enforcement, immigration or asylum processes,
such as predicting an individual will commit fraud/crime commitment.
Citation
bibtex
1@misc{supertonic3-mlx,
2 title = {Supertonic 3 MLX: native Apple Silicon port of Supertone's multilingual TTS},
3 author = {Dupont, Olivier},
4 year = {2026},
5 url = {https://huggingface.co/ambassadia/supertonic-3-mlx},
6 note = {Derivative of Supertone/supertonic-3 (https://huggingface.co/Supertone/supertonic-3)}
7}
Please also cite the upstream Supertone Supertonic 3 model when using this
port.