ACE Studio's new song model, ACE Music v1, now sits at the top of the Artificial Analysis vocal music leaderboard, one spot above Suno v6. The lead is small, the model has no public API, and Suno still leads the separate instrumental board. Here is what ACE Music v1 does, what the ranking actually measures, and what it costs to try.
What ACE Music v1 is
ACE Music v1 is a closed music generation model from ACE Studio. On its model page, ACE describes it as "a music generation model that accepts text descriptions and lyrics." You use it in a browser through the ACE Music app: log in, open the Create page and choose ACE Music v1.
There are two ways to start a song:
- From an idea. Describe the style, mood and instruments. ACE's own example prompt is "warm indie folk with acoustic guitar and a touch of nostalgia".
- From your lyrics. Paste lyrics, describe the style, and add performance directions in parentheses before a verse, chorus or line. ACE's examples include "hum softly", "sing with a raspy voice" and "add guitar here". The company says the model "uses these cues to shape its performance."
After a song is made, ACE Music can convert it to MIDI for a DAW and split it into stems (vocals, accompaniment or single instruments) for mixing.
ACE also offers a second model, ACE Music v1.1 Preview. It writes a score in ABC notation (a text format for melody, rhythm and chords) before it makes audio. You can hum a melody, play it on a keyboard or upload a MIDI file, edit the melody and chords, then generate again. ACE warns that "each generation is a new performance, so the sound may differ even when the score stays the same."
What the number-one ranking means
The board is AA-Music-Vocal v1.1. Per Artificial Analysis's methodology page, validated private evaluators listen to two tracks made from the same prompt and pick the one they prefer, without knowing which model made which. Public votes in the Music Arena do not count. The scores are computed with Bradley-Terry estimation and rescaled to an Elo-like range. On the vocal board, Artificial Analysis does not supply lyrics: each model writes its own words, so the test covers songwriting as well as sound.
When we loaded the leaderboard on November 11, 2026, the top five were:
- ACE Music v1: 1160 (95% interval 1139 to 1181, 2,119 samples)
- Suno v6: 1144 (1126 to 1162, 3,063 samples)
- Suno v6-mini: 1132 (1114 to 1150)
- Mureka V9.5: 1101 (1083 to 1119)
- Mureka V9: 1063 (1045 to 1081)
Further down, Lyria 3.5 scored 1050, Eleven Music v2.5 scored 1016, and MiniMax Music 3.0 is fixed at 1000 as the anchor for the scale.
Two cautions. First, the intervals for ACE Music v1 and Suno v6 overlap, and Artificial Analysis lists ACE's rank range as 1-2 and Suno v6's as 1-3. A 16-point lead on about 2,100 votes is a narrow result. Second, ACE says the ranking "reflects blind listening preferences for vocal music, not separate rankings for every genre or feature."
ACE Music v1 does not appear on the instrumental leaderboard, where Suno v6 leads at 1148 and Suno v6-mini follows at 1114. The methodology page says a model goes on the instrumental board only if its endpoint can produce instrumental output.
TechCityAuthority, reporting Artificial Analysis's post on X, says the model did best on Reggae/Dancehall and Classical/Orchestral prompts in that testing.
How it sounded to reviewers
Decrypt ran its own side-by-side songs. It found that ACE Music "consistently produced more melodic and coherent songs in mainstream styles," with vocals that sounded more natural and cleaner song endings. It also found that Suno handled some niche genres better, and it called its own results "subjective rather than a controlled benchmark."
Price, rights and the open-source plan
ACE Music's pricing page, checked November 11, 2026, lists:
- Free: $0, 20 credits a day (up to 10 songs), no downloads, no stem splitter, no commercial use rights.
- Creator: $7.90 a month in the yearly view (the page says yearly billing saves $24), 1,000 credits a month (up to 500 songs), unlimited downloads, stem splitter and commercial use rights.
- Artist: $16.58 a month in the yearly view (saves $149 yearly), 2,500 credits a month (up to 1,250 songs), plus access to the ACE Studio desktop app.
The page says the yearly view "shows the equivalent monthly price" and "the full annual amount is billed for the year." ACE Music v1 makes two songs per generation for 4 credits.
Rights depend on your plan when you make the song. Per the model page, songs made on a paid plan keep commercial rights after you cancel. Songs made on the free plan do not get them, "and upgrading later does not grant them retroactively."
Decrypt reports that the flagship model has no public API. For people who want to run music AI locally, ACE says it plans "to open-source ACE Music v1 Flash in late 2026," a version with "a different balance of musical quality, generation speed, and hardware requirements." A separate open model, ACE-Step 1.5, is already on GitHub under the MIT license, and Decrypt says ACE Studio and StepFun released it together. On ACE's pricing page, ACE-Step v1.5 generations are unlimited with free MP3 downloads and commercial use.
Why it matters
As TechCityAuthority reports, ACE Music v1 pushed Suno v6 into second place (see our Suno v6 explainer). ACE Studio, which Decrypt says began in 2018 with singing voices made from MIDI notes and lyrics, now edges it on vocals in a blind test, while Suno faces new lawsuits, including the Elvis and Eminem rights holder case. For creators, three points stand out: the free tier lets you test ACE Music v1 at no cost (without downloads), the gap to Suno v6 is inside the overlapping intervals, and MIDI export plus stems let you keep working on a song in your own DAW. If you already prompt Suno, our Suno prompts guide covers a similar style of control. For a wider view, see our best AI music generators roundup and our explainer on how AI music generators work.
Yamaha took a different route on November 11: its VOCALOID7 release adds a second-generation AI singing engine and five new voicebanks, but the user still enters the melody and lyrics note by note.
Sources
- ACE Music v1 model page (ACE Music)
- ACE Music v1.1 Preview (ACE Music)
- ACE Music pricing
- AA-Music-Vocal v1.1 leaderboard (Artificial Analysis)
- AA-Music-Instrumental v1.1 leaderboard (Artificial Analysis)
- Music benchmarking methodology (Artificial Analysis)
- ACE-Step 1.5 (GitHub)
- Decrypt review of ACE Music v1
- TechCityAuthority report
