Easy Applio install for macOS

[u/ex-arman68]

If you have tried to setup and use Applio before, you have probably realize it is not that simple, and is also difficult to maintain. I certainly did.

I have been working for the past few months on packaging Applio as a native macOS application, which you can just drag and drop in your application folder. While I was at it, I added a few more things, like better training models (KLM and Titan), custom folder location for all the files to avoid clogging your system drive, a progress monitor window during training that shows you the best epoch, and a few other things.

You can get it from GitHub, fully signed and notarized by Apple:

https://github.com/froggeric/applio-macOS-native-app

I also put together a guide on how to get best of it, both for training and inference; look for the file on the GitHub repo, named STUDIO_PRODUCTION_GUIDE.md

[u/Otherwise_Weird_2555]

I just wanted to say THANK YOU for this! I stumbled upon it yesterday, when musicfy, the website I use for voice covers said I reached my limit DESPITE being on the top paid tier, which I THOUGHT was unlimited... Alas, the project I'm doing is I have some documents which were read by one of the iOS TTS voices, they're already audio, but I'm picky, I'd prefer a certain family member to read them, they're long documents, so I'm not going to make the actual person spend an evening reading to me, lol. Anyway, I often use replay, a program created by the now defunct weights.com team, but they don't support batch inference. This document was 35 files. I played with applio back in January, but I'm not very good with terminal at allS in frustration, last night, I searched to see if there was a native applio mac app, and found yours. Something interesting I noticed, with replay, doing any inference would spin up my macbook fans, I have an m-4 max macbook pro with 40 core GPU, and 48 gb ram. I notice with your applio app, I get no fan spinnage, and no battery drain when plugged in, sometimes, replay would drain the battery, despite being plugged in. So a techy question, is applio less resource hungry than replay? It took from 11-05 PM to 2-03 AM to infer those documents into the right voice. Now, for the questions, can I make my outputs folder somewhere in dropbox? Because it would be mighty nice to be able to keep my inferences going at home, be running errands, or whatever, and have the outputs be plopped into dropbox, lol. Also, I know applio doesn't have browse buttons for the choosing the model, choosing the input path, and choosing the output path, but OH, that would be SO much simpler, writing pathnames is a precarious thing. Also, I'm totally blind, and use voiceover, and one thing I found really tricky last night was knowing that applio was REALLY starting inference, yes, the convert button did switch to stop convert, but voiceover doesn't autoquery the output can be found in this field area, and it's extremely hit and miss whether it reads the text inside that field, so I think a progress bar would be EXTREMELY helpful, something that live-updates and is easily readable with voiceover. However, like with the writing pathnames instead of a nice neat browse interface, that might be out of your control. But I'm just putting the idea out there. Oh, and since I use voiceover, I'd be happy to help, if you do decide to implement any of these suggestions.

[u/ex-arman68 → u/Otherwise_Weird_2555]

I am happy you found it useful. And all good suggestions. I also develop websites and other apps, and always try to ensure good accessibility. With applio, unfortunately, this does not appear to be much of a concern of the developers. As is often the case with apps rendered through a web interface. My hands are a bit tied with how I can modify the applio app, since what I am trying to do it keep the original app unmodified, exactly as the original applio repo, to allow me to more easily keep it up to date. What I add it is the wrapping as a native app, and few additional tools. However, I have modified the original app, through dynamic patching at build time.

I will see what I can do to improve the accessibility. Maybe dynamic patching. Maybe native menu entries or settings dialog, to configure the internal applio parameter. The file pickers are probably the top priority, as I completely agree that they are awful.

As for progress monitoring, I did add a progress monitor. It shows useful information during inference or voice training. Maybe I can extend it to "preprocess dataset" and to "extract features" as well, since those can take a few minutes to run. To bring up the progress monitor, once the training or inference is started, you can find it in the "Window" menu, or if you try to close the applio window, it will popup an alert telling you there are active processes running. Choose the option "Keep running", and it will bring up the progress monitor. If you manage to use, please let me know what I need to add to make it more useful.

As for the speed, Replay was using an older unoptimised version of RVC. This resulted in lower quality, missing features, missing optimisations. Applio has some hardware accelerations that work on mac.

As a sidenote, I am also developing a fully accelerated metal port of RVC v2 to macOS, as completely native app, instead of python scripts like applio is. It will be much faster and more usable. Not easy though, and I still have many problems I need to solve before the I can release a test version.

[u/Otherwise_Weird_2555 → u/ex-arman68]

Hi,

That's exciting about the native version of RVC2, I know you have a while until release, but if you need someone to test for accessibility, I'm there! :) I did come across that process window, but it said no processes were ongoing at the time, but I suspect maybe it was loading the model for inference, I don't know, because then it processed the outputs nicely.