Open-Source Music Generation: Text-to-Music & Lyrics-to-Song - AI Build & Learn

​Welcome to AI Build & Learn, a weekly AI engineering stream where we pick a new topic and learn by building together.

​This event is about generating music and audio with AI. As with the image and video events, there's no single model we're locked into — the point is to explore what's out there and actually try a few. We'll focus on open-source models, but you're welcome to bring commercial ones (Suno, Udio, and friends) if you want to compare — worth noting there isn't a fully open-source Suno equivalent yet, though the gap is closing.

​We'll look at the two main flavors: text-to-music (instrumental / sound design from a prompt) and lyrics-to-song (full tracks with vocals and accompaniment). Under the hood these lean on the same diffusion and transformer/language-model approaches as image and video, applied to audio. I'll research and try some of the best open-source options ahead of the stream, and we'll talk through the practical tradeoffs: quality, track length, controllability, speed, and licensing.

​Some things to look up to get started:

​Open-source models:

• ​YuE (YuE AI): lyrics-to-song — full tracks up to ~5 min with synchronized vocals and accompaniment

• ​ACE-Step: fast and controllable — a ~4-min song in seconds; diffusion + linear-transformer design

• ​MusicGen (Meta / AudioCraft): versatile text-to-music with melody conditioning (note: CC BY-NC — non-commercial output license)

• ​Stable Audio Open (Stability AI): great for ambient/textural audio, SFX, and samples (short clips, not full songs)

​Tooling:

• ​AudioCraft (Meta) — MusicGen / AudioGen: /facebookresearch/audiocraft

• ​Hugging Face — audio models and pipelines: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-to-audio

​Reources

• ​GitHub: /sagecodes/ai-build-and-learn

• ​Events Calendar: https://luma.com/ai-builders-and-learners

• ​Slack (Discuss during the week): Flyte Slack Group

• ​Hosted by Sage Elliott: /sageelliott

• ​Twitter Thread: https://x.com/sagecodes/status/2084346249264902210?s=20

​In this stream

• ​Intro to topic

• ​Community Discussion

• ​Practical examples

​Community challenge (optional)

​Try spending 30–90 minutes during the week learning or building something related to the topic, then share what you’re working on in Slack.

​Note on Flyte / Union

​You may see Flyte used in some demos. Flyte is an open-source AI orchestration platform maintained by Union (where I work) for building scalable, durable, and observable AI workflows. You do not need to use Flyte to participate.

• ​Union: https://www.union.ai/

• ​Flyte: https://flyte.org/

​Drop a comment with ideas for future topics (agents, RAG, MLOps, robotics, frameworks, and more).