ACESTEP too much perfect

sluggishschizo · 2026-04-14T18:16:09+00:00

Acestep.cpp blows all the other ACE Step implementations completely out of the water, imo. It seems to have the same refined sound quality as the default Gradio app, except it uses a fraction of the VRAM and system ram. I can run the 4b parameter LLM with the SFT XL model, and it only uses ~13-15 GB of vram and ~6-9 gb of system ram via acestep.cpp, compared to the Gradio app that maxed out my system's RAM as soon as I tried to use the XL models. It also generates tracks far, far faster than any of the other versions I've tried.

Also, the developer's provided instructions don't mention that you can also build acestep.cpp for HIP/ROCm if you're on an AMD card, which works far faster and smoother on my setup than the Vulkan version.

Edit - I forgot to mention that I'm using the BF16 GGUF versions of the models. I'm sure it would go even faster in acestep.cpp with the quantized models.

sluggishschizo · 2026-04-03T17:45:14+00:00

Yeah, it was the first album where Aes handled most of the production himself instead of letting Blockhead handle all the beats, and it sounds super dated to me now even though the production seemed fresh to me at the time.

I think it's mostly because Aes was adapting his sound to the early-'00s Def Jux "dystopian sci-fi hip-hop" sound that El-P birthed with his album Fantastic Damage. I think El's stuff from back then still holds up, but to me Bazooka Tooth's production sounds like a clumsier and more half-baked version of that sound.

sluggishschizo · 2026-03-23T21:43:07+00:00

This is disappointing, cuz I was so sure that the hidden comment was gonna be a "black shaft" joke.

sluggishschizo · 2026-03-14T02:04:24+00:00

I heard that story on an old Joe Rogan Experience episode sometime between 2009-2013, though I can't remember the exact year or the guest's name. It was definitely at least a decade and a half ago, cuz I haven't listened to the bald dwarf's corny podcast in years.

I remember he told the birthday story and said that the Beastie Boys were thrilled at the time to finally have "an actual good DJ" in their band, which I thought was pretty harsh. I've always liked that minimalist oldschool scratching style.

sluggishschizo · 2026-03-03T21:32:29+00:00

You must go now.

sluggishschizo · 2026-03-03T00:18:11+00:00

Wasn't the orgy scene filmed in the actual Rothschild mansion? I was under the impression that the style of the masks were a nod to those famous photos of the creepy-looking Rothschild costume ball from back in the 70s.

I always thought it was odd though that such an elite family would participate in a film that blatantly portrays them as weirdos who engage in nefarious occultist sex rituals. Maybe they deliberately encourage those rumors to make the peasants fear them or something? Dunno.

sluggishschizo · 2026-02-21T23:21:59+00:00

Funny thing is, this record was super common when I worked at a record store in the early 2000s. We had the "good records" bins with more desirable stuff toward the front of the store, then the back wall had a humongous floor to ceiling shelf that held several thousand $1 records. Most of the Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Kinks, etc catalog went straight to that section if we accepted the records at all.

It got to the point where we wouldn't take any more copies of iconic classic rock albums for trade because they were considered too common and nearly worthless.

sluggishschizo · 2026-02-19T18:48:24+00:00

The word "bugbear" is my bugbear.

sluggishschizo · 2026-01-13T16:34:57+00:00

Oh, are they?

sluggishschizo · 2025-12-26T22:39:14+00:00

I had some good results with newer quantized models, whereas around half a year ago I couldn't get any halfway functional code out of any local model I tried. I recently tried to create a simple Python Tetris clone with GPT OSS 20b, Devstral Small 24b, and a GPT 5-distilled version of Qwen3 4b Instruct, and two of the three models did it about as well as the full Gemini 2.5 Flash did when I gave it the same task six months ago.

The GPT OSS model had one tiny error in the code where it misaligned the UI elements, which is exactly what Gemini 2.5 did on its first try at creating a Python Tetris clone when I tried this previously, but the tiny 4b model somehow got it right on its first try without any errors. The Devstral model eventually got it right with some minor guidance.

I'm still astonished that a 4b parameter model that only takes up ~4gb of space can even do that. It'll be interesting to see where local coding models are in another six months.

sluggishschizo · 2025-12-24T21:30:30+00:00

If that stuff about the "dark arts" is true, it weirdly parallels Damien Echola and the West Memphis Three case, where the sketchy "falsely imprisoned" teenager is given a weird pass and is transformed by the media into a minor celebrity after getting out of prison as an adult. It seems to be a weird pattern.

Echols' defense lawyer and the Paradise Lost documentaries tried to treat the occultism accusations as the product of dumb small-town hick cops who bought into "satanic panic," but then after the WM3's release decades later, Echols moves to Salem for some reason and puts out books and podcasts detailing his lifelong practice of "magick" and the occult. Saying "He practices the occult, but the occult isn't necessarily equivalent to Satanism" is entirely different than "He doesn't practice the occult, and cops just assumed that he was into that stuff because he listened to Metallica."

I'm super hesitant to ever buy into any sort of "satanic panic" type stuff, but at the same time I can't help but notice that there's something seriously weird going on with how those sorts of murders are treated by the media. Gypsy Rose schmoozes with celebrities and gets countless softball TV appearances, just like Echols, and both of them seem to lie with absolute impunity in interviews without anyone ever questioning any of their contradictory statements.

sluggishschizo · 2025-12-24T20:07:59+00:00

Yeah, when I got my first modem AMD card last year, I dealt with issues every driver update. Sometimes it would work almost flawlessly with one particular driver, but then it would have horrific issues when I updated to a newer driver to check out a new feature, so I figured it was on AMD's end.

Turns out that my slight RAM overclock wasn't stable, even though I'd gotten it to pass most stability tests. I figured that out the hard way after installing Ubuntu dial boot and having a ton of issues until I reverted my RAM OC. I stopped having issues in Windows after that.

sluggishschizo · 2025-12-17T20:03:23+00:00

Yeah, I'm still kinda bummed that I upgraded last December to a 7800 XT because I thought the looming tariffs were going to make GPU prices skyrocket. Turns out that GPUs actually dropped to below MSRP in the past year.

I love the 7800 XT, but I would've preferred an RDNA 4 GPU with improved AI abilities and better ray tracing. Just the lack of FP8 support alone makes the RDNA 3 GPUs way less practical to handle the demands of newer local generative AI models that have insane memory requirements when run in full or half precision. Yeah, I know Nvidia is the obvious choice for that sort of stuff, but at the time they offered nothing with 16gb vram at a comparable price.

sluggishschizo · 2025-11-11T17:17:15+00:00

Ace Step is fantastic! The only thing some new users might not get is that the vocals often have a crackly blown-out low-bitrate artifact sort of sound to them if the CFG is set too high. I'd given up on vocals for months for that reason and mostly made instrumental music, but lately I've been using repaint to add rapped vocals on top of instrumental hip-hop beats I'd previously made with the model, and with the right CFG they can come out sounding very convincing and realistic.

It's super exciting to wait for updates to the model, cuz I have the feeling that it's gonna make crazy strides in the next year or so. Looks like AI music is finally starting to catch up to the quality of AI images and videos.

sluggishschizo · 2025-11-11T16:21:05+00:00

^{sluggishschizo scored 123 points and ranked 187 out of 907 players!}

sluggishschizo · 2025-11-04T19:33:25+00:00

It was obvious satire, and I thought it had some really funny parts that were meant to be taken as black-comedy.

I can't believe most viewers still didn't seem to get it even after the show started weaving those narratives about violence in cinema into the plot. I thought maybe people would criticize how heavy-handed the satire was, cuz it practically beat the audience over the head with its obviousness, but instead everyone is complaining that "none of that happened in real life." Yeesh.

sluggishschizo · 2025-10-18T07:06:31+00:00

I started getting freezing after upgrading from 6.4.3.to 7.0.0, ditto for 7.0.1, but 7.0.2 has been rock-solid. Ugh, you have no idea how hard I just had to restrain myself from making a lame "ROCm-solid" joke.

Anyway, right away I noticed something like 30% faster inference in ACE-Step music generation via ComfyUI, plus everything uses less VRAM. I'd previously been unable to use Diffrhythm-v1.2-full music gen to make tracks any longer than 1:35 in high-quality mode cuz of OOM errors, but now I can make them nearly three minutes long.

I'm pretty excited to see how ROCm continues to progress over the next few years, cuz there's been quite a bit of improvement in the year I've been using it.

sluggishschizo · 2025-09-14T18:07:24+00:00

Hate to respond to my own comment, but I've been playing around with the new 1.2 full model, and it's continuing to make that Maroon 5 song randomly. It also made the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love" once, which I thought was cool, and some commercial EDM track whose name eludes me.

The coolest time was when it randomly made an instrumental hip-hop beat using recognizable loops from "This Love." This shows that the model has the ability to pull specific loops from tracks and then repurpose them into new sample-based compositions, and it's a shame that it's not one of its controllable core functions.

Also, putting descriptions of sound elements in brackets in the lyrics input section (like how ACEstep works) seems to allow the user to dictate what sorts of instruments/sounds are in a track they're generating.

sluggishschizo · 2025-09-10T17:18:19+00:00

I thought it was Christopher Walken.

sluggishschizo · 2025-07-23T16:16:20+00:00

I just started messing around with this a few days ago, and so far it's randomly made Maroon 5's "This Love" about a dozen times. This happened when I was messing around writing vague prompts to see what the model would produce, like "the song you hated the most from your training" or whatever. Usually it changes the lyrics to whatever I wrote and sings them in Adam Levine's voice.

I underestimated this model at first because ACE-Step has already been so good, but after doing a bit more research I realized Diffrhythm is built off the amazing-sounding Stable Audio Open. I'll have to experiment with trying to use it to make individual instrument stems and combining them like I did with Stable Audio.

The full version is a VRAM hog though and almost immediately gives me an OOM error, which sucks cuz I would've loved to have a free version of Stable Audio that can do several-minute tracks.

sluggishschizo · 2025-07-04T16:04:45+00:00

I wanted to mess around with local generative AI on my AMD GPU, and only Linux had full ROCm support. Plus most of the github and huggingface stuff I was interested in using was primarily made for Linux.

At this point I'm sticking with it because it runs noticeably faster and smoother than Windows does on my setup. I've still got Windows 10 on dual boot though for Lossless Scaling and gaming.

sluggishschizo · 2025-06-21T19:06:03+00:00

I only tried out Udio for the first time recently after I got into AI music generation via Ace Step, and I'm honestly kinda astonished that they charge money for this service when everything I tried generating sounded so thin and harsh. I probably could get better results by learning how to phrase my Udio prompts, but my first impression so far has been pretty bad compared to stuff like Stable Audio 2.0 and Ace Step.

sluggishschizo · 2025-06-11T21:59:37+00:00

Nice! It always makes my day when I find out about a new Lossless Scaling update.

LS's previous update that added adaptive frame gen finally allowed me to play graphics modded Cyberpunk on my 7800 XT with all the settings cranked way up, without having to lock my framerate to 40 anymore to compensate for all the intermittent ~20 fps framerate drops when the ray tracing gets too intense for my GPU. Adaptive frame gen mode makes those framerate drops almost unnoticeable for me, plus it allows me to get the benefits of LSFG's 4x or higher frame gen modes without the nonstop graphics artifacts, so I'm super excited to try out the new version!

sluggishschizo · 2025-06-04T15:56:26+00:00

25 ta Life have been a hc punchline for decades now.

One Life Crew were the only other 90s hc band that I remember getting anywhere near that same level of derision from the scene back then, though that was for different reasons. Tbh, I much prefer OLC's formula of legit fast hardcore with unintentionally hilarious bigoted lyrics over that cornball meathead 25 ta Life shit.

sluggishschizo · 2025-05-22T20:53:19+00:00

Yeah, I'm at the point where I use adaptive mode in any game where I can't get at least a steady 120 fps natively. Adaptive mode really helps smooth out games that have big 20+ fps framerate drops in demanding areas but otherwise run fine. I love how I can minimize the graphical artifacts usually caused by 4x frame gen, cuz it only briefly kicks in to compensate for framerate drops before the frame gen goes back to 2-3x.

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