---
title: Music on a Mac
summary: How long Stable Audio 3 takes to write a music bed on Apple Silicon, through the same generate_music call an AI assistant makes.
---

# Music on a Mac

How long Stable Audio 3 takes to write a music bed on Apple Silicon, through the same generate_music call an AI assistant makes.

## Machines

- [MacBook Pro, Apple M3 Max, 64 GB unified memory](/resources/groundslate/benchmarks/machines/macbook-pro-m3-max-64): Reference Mac

## The measurement

- Machine: MacBook Pro, Apple M3 Max, 64 GB unified memory
- Run: 2026-09-03, 2026-09-03-macbook-pro-m3-max-64

## Music generation time per bed

- One music bed: One generate_music call for an instrumental bed about a minute long, from a written brief. The figures below count each bed as 64 seconds.

| Model | Repo | Size | One music bed | One music bed realtime | One music bed range |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Stable Audio 3 Medium | `stabilityai/stable-audio-3-optimized` | 5.2 GB | 8.14s | 7.86× | 4.81s to 3m 15s |

## Findings

A minute of music takes about eight seconds on a Mac that spends over seven minutes on one five-second video clip. Music runs at roughly eight times realtime and video at about a ninetieth of realtime. Music is the only generator you can call mid-task without planning around the wait.
Yes, only the first. The model loads from disk once and stays in memory, so every later call skips the load. The video model is the opposite: it unloads after every clip and loads again for the next.

## Methodology

- Machine: MacBook Pro, Apple M3 Max, 64 GB unified memory
- Engine: mlx
- Default model: stabilityai/stable-audio-3-optimized
- Models locked: Yes
- Path: Timed through the generate_music tool, so the figure includes the queue and saving the wav to the library.

## Models and tools

### Stable Audio 3 Medium

- Repo: `stabilityai/stable-audio-3-optimized`
- Maker: Stability AI
- License: [Stability AI Community License](https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-audio-3-optimized/blob/main/LICENSE.md)
- Size: 5.2 GB
- Tools: generate_music, audio_beats, music_map, mix_audio, list_generations
- Page: /resources/groundslate/benchmarks/sound/stable-audio-3-medium