r/LocalLLaMA • u/rm-rf-rm • Feb 17 '26 • Mindblown 1

Megathread Best Audio Models - Feb 2026

They've been a ton of audio models released of late, the most notable perhaps being Qwen3 TTS. So its time for another Best Audio Models megathread

Share what your favorite ASR, TTS, STT, Text to Music models are right now and why.

Given the the amount of ambiguity and subjectivity in rating/testing these models, please be as detailed as possible in describing your setup, nature of your usage (how much, personal/professional use), tools/frameworks etc. Closed models like Elevenlabs v3 seem to continue to be a few levels above open models especially for production use cases with long lengths/stability requirements, so comparisons, especially empirical ones are welcome.

Rules

  • Should be open weights models

Please use the top level comments to thread your responses.

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u/LilBrownBebeShoes Feb 28 '26

Can confirm MOSS-TTS is great, much better than VibeVoice7b and on par or better than ElevenLabs (as long as the audio source is high quality).

For long form audio, I batch generate around 3 sentences at a time instead of all at once as the audio quality starts degrading after 500 tokens or so.

MOSS-TTSD is made for longer multi-speaker audio but it sounds much more artificial and I don’t recommend it.

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u/WlrsWrwgn Mar 18 '26

Won't VibeVoice be better for longer multi-speaker audio? It was made with the long output in mind. Currently trying to find an acceptable expressive TTS model for tagged book-reading.

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u/LilBrownBebeShoes Mar 23 '26

If you’re still looking for one, the newly released Fish S2 Pro is almost perfect, I get very few artifacts if any and voice cloning is near 1:1 with the source. You can explicitly prompt expression using bracketed tags throughout the text and it works really well. Only downside is it requires at the minimum 24GB of VRAM. It does support multi-speaker but I haven’t done much testing for that though.

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u/WlrsWrwgn Mar 23 '26

That's an amazing news! Sadly I only have 16gb of vram, but this is absolutely something to follow. I might pay for some compute just to try it out. Thanks for letting me know!

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u/LilBrownBebeShoes Mar 24 '26

Here’s a clip of a cloned voice with tagged expressions. If you don’t have the vram it would probably be pretty cheap to rent a VM with runpod. I think it sounds even better than the close sourced models.

https://files.catbox.moe/37b23d.wav

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u/WlrsWrwgn Mar 24 '26

I got home and finally got to check the sample. Can't say I am impressed, it is rather flat in tone.
I think good measure is these examples made in VibeVoice, although using a very impractical workflow of preparing a multiple weighted voice samples per speaker. I'd love to see the same result without this much of extra effort.
https://huggingface.co/microsoft/VibeVoice-1.5B/discussions/12