GitHub - DexterLagan/MusicMaxxer: A local desktop app for generating songs through MiniMax's hosted Music API.

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5 min read Original article ↗

A local desktop app for Windows and macOS, generating songs through MiniMax's hosted Music API. Single user, single machine, no server component — every generation is a direct call from your own machine to MiniMax's API, and everything it produces is written straight to a plain-folder library on your disk that you own and can read without the app.

Download

Pre-built binaries for both platforms are on the Releases page:

  • Windows (x86_64) — the .exe (NSIS) or .msi installer
  • macOS (Apple Silicon) — the .dmg

Neither is code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will both flag it on first launch — see the release notes for the one-time bypass on each.

What it does

  • Compose a song from a caption (genre, tempo, mood, vocal character, production) and a lyric sheet with structure tags — [Verse], [Chorus], [Bridge], and eleven others MiniMax recognises.
  • Live lint on the lyrics field. MiniMax sings anything in brackets that isn't one of its fourteen exact structure tags — including near-misses like [Verse 1] — with no error and no warning from the API itself. MusicMaxxer catches this before you spend a generation: it flags the line, suggests the tag you probably meant, and asks for confirmation if you generate anyway.
  • A real library on disk, one folder per song: an editable song.md recipe (drag it back onto the window to restore every field), an immutable run.json receipt per take, and a meta.json star rating. Nothing here is a database — it's just files, readable and greppable without the app.
  • History with inline playback. Every take is listed, star-rated 1–5, filterable by rating and free text, and playable with a seek slider right in the app. Clicking a take reloads that take's own settings — pulled from its immutable receipt, not from the song's shared recipe — back into the compose form, so you can pick up where a specific generation left off.
  • Dark mode — System / Light / Dark, plus a one-click toggle in the titlebar.
  • The API key never leaves Rust. It's typed once into Settings, stored in your OS's own credential store (Credential Manager on Windows, Keychain on macOS), and no command ever hands it back to the webview. The frontend cannot reach the network or the filesystem directly — every effect, including audio playback, is routed through a Tauri command.

Requirements

To build from source:

  • Windows (x86_64) or macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel)
  • Rust (stable toolchain)
  • Node.js 18+
  • A MiniMax account with music API access and an API key (paid models, and the -free tier, both require a funded account — see SPEC.md §3.5 for what was actually observed here)

Getting started

git clone https://github.com/dexterlagan/MusicMaxxer.git
cd MusicMaxxer
npm install

Run in development mode, with hot reload:

Or build a release bundle for your platform:

npm run tauri build     # installer lands under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

On macOS, npm run app:build / npm run app / npm run app:install are shortcuts for building, opening, and installing the .app specifically.

On first launch, open Settings (the gear icon) and paste in your MiniMax API key. It's written to the Keychain immediately and never stored anywhere else.

Where things live

Generated songs are written to ~/MiniMaxMusic by default — one folder per song, one subfolder per take:

~/MiniMaxMusic/
  some-song-title/
    song.md          the recipe: caption, lyrics, and settings — hand-editable,
                      rewritten on every generate to match the newest take
    song.json         machine bookkeeping (take numbering), ignore this
    take-01/
      track.wav
      run.json        the immutable receipt for this exact take
      meta.json        star rating, only written once you rate it
    take-02/
      ...

Drag a song.md onto the app window to restore every field of the form it came from — title, caption, lyrics, and flags.

Project structure

crates/
  minimax/     API client — typed requests, response parsing, error mapping,
               and client-side validation, independently testable against
               recorded fixtures (no Tauri, no filesystem, no UI)
  studio/      app logic — credentials (OS keychain), the on-disk library
               layout, the song.md recipe format, lyric structure-tag linting
src-tauri/     the Tauri shell — the only place that touches the network,
               the filesystem, or the API key; every command is the sole
               bridge between the webview and everything else
ui/            the compose/history frontend — vanilla TypeScript, no
               framework, talks to Rust exclusively through invoke()
design/        the original clickable HTML mockup used to validate the UI
               before any of it was built
SPEC.md        the build contract — API behaviour (including everything
               observed that contradicts MiniMax's own docs), the on-disk
               format, and the UI spec section by section

SPEC.md is the source of truth for why things are built the way they are — it records real observed API behaviour (undocumented duration drivers, the bracket-singing failure mode, wall-clock timing that doesn't track output length) rather than assumptions, and flags anywhere the docs and reality disagreed.

Status

Model, output format, and library location are all configurable from the collapsed panel on Compose. The Cover tab (remixing a reference track) and an optional offline/online lyric-assistant pass are designed in the spec but not yet built.

License

MIT