Requirements

Hardware

An NVIDIA GPU. These are diffusion and transformer models. A 16 GB card runs everything comfortably in Q8 precision. Less than that limits which models you can load, and the model pages list the memory each one needs.

Disk. Models are large. ACE-Step is around 6 GB and MiniMax Music 3 is around 13 GB. A full set of everything Miso can use runs past 40 GB. Your own projects are small by comparison, usually around 1 GB for a working set of takes.

Docker, with the NVIDIA container toolkit for GPU access.

Node 22 or newer, only if you want to run Miso from source. The Docker stack does not need it.

Running without a GPU

The full-cpu image runs Miso end to end. Generation takes minutes per take instead of seconds.

AUDIOCPP_TAG=full-cpu docker compose up -d

This is useful for looking around and for testing the interface. It is not a way to work.

Driver versions

The default image is full-cuda12, because CUDA 12 runs on older drivers. Three other tags exist:

Tag	Use it when
full-cuda12	Default. Works on older NVIDIA drivers.
full-cuda13	Your driver is new enough. Same server, newer CUDA.
full-vulkan	Vulkan-capable card without CUDA.
full-cpu	No GPU, or you only want to look around.

Set the tag with an environment variable:

AUDIOCPP_TAG=full-cuda13 docker compose up -d

Docker Desktop on Linux

Docker Desktop on Linux runs in a virtual machine and cannot pass a GPU through, however the host is set up. If docker context ls shows desktop-linux as current, switch to the system daemon before you go any further:

docker context use default

The check that matters most

A broken NVIDIA container setup does not announce itself. The container starts, nvidia-smi works inside it, and CUDA falls back to the processor. Generation still produces a song, just minutes later than it would on the card, and nothing in either log says why.

Run the preflight script before you install anything:

./scripts/preflight.sh

It checks six things. The last one compares the UVM device major number on the host with the one inside a container, which is where that difference shows up. It pulls a 5 MB busybox image to do it.

If a check fails, fix it before going on. The stack will start either way, which is the problem.