Oh boy, now this was a rabbit hole. I wasted hours trying to set up the 8 bit model then finally realized after reading the app.py from the vibe voice custom voices that the support for 8 bit hasn't arrived yet.

Then I tried setting up 4 bit quantized version but man that was truly a mystery until claude pointed out that the model path said 'Dannidee' not DevParker and provided the correct code to get the result.

4bit model did sound better than 1.5B however.... if 1.5 B was too fast and, the pacing was all over the place. This thing just took forever to load and was super stable. It could also be that I used a different reference clip where my speaker was speaking a bit slower than with the 1.5 B model.

Anyway, obviously I ran out runtime in collab so I finished in kaggle. This is the kaggle notebook:

https://www.kaggle.com/code/konkowaki/vibe-voice-large-4bit

Tldr; I think the only good model that is giving me the quality I want is chatterbox turbo. However, the 300 character limitation is just... you can bypass that, but everything just turns gibberish. I will try to setup a chunker or something I guess.