Music and sound

Stable Audio 3.0 Small and Small SFX

Name: Stable Audio 3.0 Small and Small SFX
Author: Stability AI

Two open-weight on-device variants released 20 May 2026. Small runs full music composition on a mobile device or consumer laptop with tracks up to two minutes; Small SFX is tuned for sound-effect generation on the same class of hardware.

An audio model by Stability AI · read 2026-08-14 · sourcing medium

Up to: 120 seconds
Weights: Downloadable
API: No
Commercial use: Permitted subject to conditions

Both are published on Hugging Face under the Stability AI Community License.

Commercial use — Permitted subject to conditions

Stability AI Community License (5 July 2024 version): free for individuals and entities under USD $1,000,000 annual revenue for research, non-commercial and commercial use; the licence terminates automatically once that threshold is crossed and a separate commercial licence is required.

Revenue threshold: free below $1,000,000 in annual revenue, chargeable above it.

Free only below a revenue threshold. Stability AI Community License (5 July 2024 version): free for individuals and entities under USD $1,000,000 annual revenue for research, non-commercial and commercial use; the licence terminates automatically once that threshold is crossed and a separate commercial licence is required
The licence ends when the subscription ends. Stability AI Community License (5 July 2024 version): free for individuals and entities under USD $1,000,000 annual revenue for research, non-commercial and commercial use; the licence terminates automatically once that threshold is crossed and a separate commercial licence is required

The conditions above were extracted from the licence notes recorded during research, and each one shows the sentence it came from so you can check the reading. Read the licence before you rely on any of this. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and this site does not tell you a model is cleared for commercial use.

Specification

Vendor figures, read 2026-08-14Read from Stability AI's own documentation on 2026-08-14. Vendors change these between model versions without announcing it, so check theirs before you commit a shot to a number. Sourcing for this entry is mixed. Some fields came from pages we retrieved, others could not be confirmed and are left blank. Check the vendor's current documentation

What it takes in: text
What it makes: audio
Maximum duration: 120 seconds
Controls: style-prompting
Weights: Downloadable
API: No
Pricing: Free under the Stability AI Community License below $1M annual revenue; Enterprise License above that.
Released or updated: 2026-05-20

Strengths

Runs on phones and consumer laptops - no cloud cost or upload
First Stable Audio generation to do full music composition on-device
Dedicated SFX variant for sound design
You own the outputs per the licence

Weaknesses

Two-minute ceiling for Small; no documented ceiling for Small SFX
Quality trade-off versus Medium/Large
Attribution and $1M revenue cap conditions
Sample rate and parameter counts not documented on the pages fetched

Best for

On-device and offline generation
Bulk sound-effect generation for game and video work
Mobile apps embedding audio generation

Where the sources disagree

Recorded rather than resolved. Picking the tidier number would hide the fact that the vendor's own pages do not agree.

Small and Small SFX are marketed as distinct models but Stability's pages give a duration figure (2 minutes) only for Small; they are combined here rather than inventing an SFX limit.

What to understand before using it

Explainers naming the mechanisms this model's own documentation mentions.

Diffusion models: generation by denoising names “sample”
Open weights versus closed API: renting or owning the model names “versus”

MCP servers that front Stability AI

Servers in the media MCP directory whose own description or homepage names this vendor. Absence of a server here is not evidence that none exists: most publish no tool list at all.

Audio Analyzer Audio and voice
Gives LLMs ears. Spectral, harmonic, rhythm, stereo, and structural audio analysis.
Audiolla Music
Self-hosted MCP server: audio stems, mastering, MIR analysis, DSP, MIDI, speech tools.
Civitai Image generation
Civitai MCP.
Cochlea Audio and voice
Render, analyze, and verify audio (WAV/FLAC/mp3/ogg) offline and deterministically via MCP tools.
Comfyui Image generation
MCP server + Claude Code plugin for ComfyUI: run workflows, generate images, manage models & VRAM.
Corent Image generation
Generate images and videos via the Corent API, auto model routing with provider fallback.

1 further server name Stability AI with lower confidence and are not listed, because a server naming a vendor may be using it for text rather than media.

See it from the vendor

Shotcraft hosts no sample output. Judging a model means watching its own showreel with your own eyes, and a clip re-hosted here would be a clip we chose.

Nearby in the directory

Stable Audio 3.0 Large

The flagship closed-weights model in the Stable Audio 3.0 family, released 20 May 2026 and aimed at music platforms and high-volume production. It gen

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Stable Audio 3.0 Medium

The open-weights mid-size member of the Stable Audio 3.0 family, released 20 May 2026 for full song composition with tracks up to 6:20. Weights are pu

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Stable Audio Open Small

A 0.5B-parameter latent diffusion transformer released 14 May 2025 with Arm, generating up to 11 seconds of 44.1 kHz stereo audio from English text pr

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Sources

Read on 2026-08-14. A source that has changed since then will not be reflected here until the next pass.