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YuE2 vs Suno V6 — Local Open Music Generation (MattVidPro)

5 min read

Source: raw/I_Didn_t_Expect_YuE2_to_Sound_THIS_Good.md. Creator: MattVidPro AI. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQVmJog7au8. Platform: YouTube (auto-captions, fetched 2026-09-29; upload date not recorded). Caption fixes: “UE2” → YuE2, “Pinocchio” → Pinokio, “Waifu GP” / “WAN 2 GP” → Wan2GP.

MattVidPro pits YuE2, an Apache-2.0 open-source music model that runs on a gaming PC, against Suno V6, the closed market leader. His verdict: Suno V6 “has a clear edge” in stylistic range, but YuE2 is “nipping at the heels,” “very much serviceable,” and “probably the best local open source AI music generation we’ve had access to ever.” The practical news is two things together: a no-code local install through Pinokio, and Suno’s new cap of 20 downloads a month.

Key Takeaways

  • YuE2 runs locally on modest hardware. It is “fully open-source, runs on your gaming computer locally, just 4 and 1/2 gigs of VRAM, supporting both AMD and Nvidia.” For a smooth run he advises more than 6 GB of VRAM and says “best results” come from 8 GB cards and up.
  • Licence: Apache 2.0. He credits the licence as part of the reason it can ship inside Pinokio with Wan2GP.
  • Quality, in his ears. YuE2 is “like Suno V4 and beyond”; MiniMax Music M3, by comparison, is “like a Suno V3, V3.5 level.” YuE2’s “own benchmarks actually put it in line with Suno V6,” a self-reported claim.
  • Suno V6 still leads on range. It has “a much wider diversity in terms of the different instruments.” On arena-rock comedy YuE2 was “not as dramatic and overdone as Suno,” which he counts as one of Suno’s strengths.
  • Speed. On his machine YuE2 generated a 3:20 song in 1:09, and another song in under a minute.
  • Suno V6’s new limits. A terms-of-service change caps downloads at 20 a month; “upgrading to the premiere plan only gets you 60 songs per month.” You can queue 10 songs at once but download only 20. He guesses the cap “has something to do with the commercial rights”; that is his speculation. Free users get “little V6 previews,” with full songs only through V6 Mini.
  • Suno V6 lineup. V6 Mini (“very fast and still quite good”) and V6 Wild (“for more experimental stuff”). He prefers V6 to V5.5.
  • His daily pick right now is YuE2, “because there’s so much to be explored. There’s no penalty for trying weird, new, unusual things.” He will keep using Suno V6 as well.

Details

  • What YuE2 does.
    • It takes a Suno-style style prompt plus lyrics.
    • It also shows a “raw ABC” score, “what looks like genuine sheet music.”
    • It missed a lyric in one test but stayed “coherent and adhering.”
  • Head-to-head songs.
    • Lemonade-stand hip-hop: “I think Suno is still better, but that is really good.” YuE2 was “still carrying that song confidently and well.”
    • “Sewer alligator” love song: “Suno V6 has a clear edge here,” but YuE2 is “nipping at the heels.”
    • Arena-rock comedy: YuE2 got the style but was “not as dramatic and overdone as Suno.”
    • Instrumentals (techno, dark electro, synthwave, “driving country blues”): these worked. The country track “sounds like a truck commercial.”
  • Artefacts. A “high-pitched kind of shimmery-ness” on cymbals; Suno shows the same, “probably not as bad.” “You can still tell it’s AI music.”
  • Controls Suno doesn’t expose. Inference steps, temperature, guidance and a locked seed let you “refine something over time.” Raising steps is “a little bit of a diminishing return”; he went up to 100.
  • Wan2GP extras. Source audio, composition planning, and a built-in enhancer for the music-style prompt or lyrics. Wan2GP also runs text-to-video workflows.
  • LoRAs. He mentions LoRAs as a future way to strengthen particular styles but did not test them.
  • Other music tools he names. Lyria (inside Google Gemini), Trebelo (“avoids some of the common pitfalls” of Suno) and Happy Shrimp.

Try It

  1. Check your GPU. On Windows, press Win+X, open Task Manager, go to Performance, then GPU, and read “Dedicated GPU memory.” Over 6 GB should work; 8 GB or more is better. NVIDIA and AMD are both supported. Pinokio runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, but YuE2’s Mac support is “experimental,” with user errors reported.
  2. Install without code.
    • Download Pinokio and find YuE2 in its app list.
    • Click Install. It runs in several stages; click again until everything finishes.
    • Press Start, scroll to the Music section in Wan2GP and pick the YuE2 3B model.
    • Hit Generate. The first run downloads the remaining models; the whole install came to “less than 20 GB.”
  3. Port a Suno prompt. He pasted YuE2’s prompt guide into ChatGPT and had it rewrite a Suno song’s style and lyrics into YuE2’s format.
  4. Iterate cheaply. Lock a seed and nudge temperature and steps rather than re-rolling blind. Keep step increases small, since returns diminish.
  5. Do the download maths. If a project needs many downloadable tracks a month, such as background beds for video or ads, compare Suno’s 20 (or 60 on Premier) with unlimited local generation

Open Questions

  • Commercial use of generated audio. Does Apache 2.0 on the model settle it? The source doesn’t address output rights, so check YuE2’s repository and your own legal position before using tracks commercially.
  • Benchmark provenance. “Its own benchmarks” is YuE2’s self-reported chart; no methodology is given.
  • Why Suno capped downloads. He speculates about commercial rights. Suno’s plan prices are not given.
  • Who develops YuE2. The source links “the original UE2 project from GitHub” but never names the team.
  • Mac support status beyond “experimental.”

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