Mlx Audio Server

MLX Audio Server

mlx-audio: The best audio processing library built on Apple's MLX framework, providing fast and efficient text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT), and speech-to-speech (STS) on Apple Silicon.

This skill will run it as a OpenAI-compatible API server on macOS in background, and provide scripts/examples for AI agents to use the api.

Default Models:

• Speech-To-Text: mlx-community/glm-asr-nano-2512-8bit
• Text-To-Speech: mlx-community/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign-bf16

The server will download these models when needed, so first run will be a bit slow.

More choices here: https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-models

Requirements

• mlx: macOS with Apple Silicon
• brew: used to install deps if not available

Installation

bash ${baseDir}/install.sh

This script will:

• clone (forked) mlx-audio repo into ~/opt/mlx-audio
• use uv to create a venv and install deps in it: ~/opt/mlx-audio/.venv
• create a plist file to run mlx-audio server as a launchd service in background in user domain
• run as a OpenAI compatible API server, on port 8899 by default.

Usage

STT/Speech-To-Text:

# input will be converted to wav with ffmpeg, if not yet.
# output will be transcript text only.
bash ${baseDir}/run_stt.sh <audio_or_video_path>

TTS/Text-To-Speech:

# audio will be saved into a tmp dir, with default name `speech.wav`, and print to stdout.
bash ${baseDir}/run_tts.sh "Hello, Human!"
# or you can specify a output dir
bash ${baseDir}/run_tts.sh "Hello, Human!" ./output
# output will be audio path only.

You can use both scripts directly, or as example/reference.