MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct

MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct

Listens to a song and answers questions about it: lyrics with timestamps, mood and genre, key, tempo and chords, and song structure. For developers and researchers working with music audio.

Made by OpenMOSS-Team on Hugging Face. These notes are Mindket's, written from its model page and model card; the model's own files and license are on Hugging Face.

About

What it is: MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct is an open music understanding model from the OpenMOSS team and partners. You give it audio and a text question, and it answers in text. It builds on the MOSS-Audio backbone and is further trained on music.

The release has two 8B models. This Instruct one follows instructions directly, while a sibling Thinking model adds step-by-step reasoning for musical analysis.

Who it suits: It suits developers, researchers and music-tech teams who need a program to describe, transcribe or analyze songs, in English or Chinese.

Industry | Who uses it | How they use it | Example
Music tech | Developers | Tag and describe tracks in a catalog | Write a short mood and genre note
Music research | Researchers | Study key, tempo and chord reasoning | Get chords with timestamps
Media | Content teams | Transcribe sung lyrics with timing | Produce timed lyrics for a clip
Education | Music teachers | Break a song into sections for study | List intro, verse and chorus parts

If you only work with speech or plain text, you can skip it.

Where to use it: The model runs with the transformers library and is meant for a computer with a capable GPU. The card's contents also list SGLang serving and a Gradio app.

• Python with transformers on Windows, macOS or Linux
• SGLang serving, as the card's quickstart describes
• A Gradio app, as the card's quickstart describes

Use case | Who | What they get back
Lyrics transcription | Media teams | Sung text with sentence and word timestamps
Track description | Catalog teams | Mood, genre, instruments and style in plain words
Music analysis | Researchers | Key, beats, chords and song sections

How to set it up: You need Python with pip and enough disk space for the 18.1 GB of BF16 weights. The card's quickstart covers environment setup, serving and the demo app.

• Python with pip
• About 18.1 GB of free disk space for BF16 weights
• A GPU for comfortable speed

1. Install the Hugging Face hub package.
2. Download the model files.
3. Follow the quickstart in the model card to set up the environment.

pip install -U huggingface_hub
hf download OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct

How to use it: You pass a song as audio together with a text request and read the text answer. Typical requests are for lyrics, a description, key and chords, or the song's sections.

Example: You give the model a song and ask for its structure. It answers with a text breakdown into intro, verse, chorus, bridge and outro, and notes where parts repeat or contrast.

For newcomers and experts: If you are new, try one short song and ask for a description of its mood and instruments. That shows you how the model talks about music before you try harder tasks.

If you know the field, raw audio goes through a trained audio encoder at 12.5 Hz, then an adapter into the language model. The design adds cross-layer feature injection and a time-aware representation to keep low-level sound detail.

Audio goes into the encoder
An adapter maps it to the LLM
The LLM reads your question
Text answer comes out

Good to know: The card says the Thinking sibling gives stronger chain-of-thought reasoning, so pick that one for deep analysis. The page promised a blog and a paper later.

• License: apache-2.0
• Cost to run: none named, but the 9.1B model wants a capable GPU
• Data it reaches: the audio and text you send, and the model files you download

On Hugging Face, 13 November 2026

• Task: audio text to text
• Library: transformers
• Parameters: 9.1B
• Weights: about 18.1 GB in BF16; about 4.5 GB at 4-bit (estimate)
• Formats: Safetensors
• Downloads in the last 30 days: 2,910
• Likes: 53
• License: apache-2.0
• Languages: en, zh
• Quantized versions: 6
• Fine-tunes: 3
• Tags: transformers, safetensors, moss_music, music, music-understanding, audio, audio-language-model, moss, moss-music, lyrics-asr, music-captioning, chord-recognition

Links

• Model: https://huggingface.co/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct
• Files: https://huggingface.co/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct/tree/main

Get the model

Download its files with Hugging Face's command line:

pip install -U huggingface_hub
hf download OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Music-8B-Instruct

Then follow the usage in its model card. Nothing in this kit runs by itself.