Use Kokoro with MLX on Mac

The MLX engine runs text-to-speech faster, uses less memory, CPU, and battery, and often delivers higher audio quality than other local runtimes on Apple Silicon.

Setup

  1. Make sure you are using WithAudio at the latest version (or at least 0.1.76) and that you are using the MacOS ARM version.
  2. Open Settings.
  3. Open Engines.
  4. Find the Kokoro card.
  5. Under Preferred runtime, if more than one option appears, choose WithAudio Local MacOS MLX (3x Faster). You are done. If that option does not appear, continue with the steps below.
  6. Click Download next to WithAudio Local MacOS MLX (not downloaded).
  7. Progress may stall visually for a while, then jump when the download advances—this is normal.
  8. When the download finishes, select WithAudio Local MacOS MLX (3x Faster) as the preferred runtime.
  9. You are good to go—new audio will use the MLX engine.