Mold Studio for Mac

Mold Studio is the native macOS app for mold and the recommended download on a Mac. It is written in Swift, carries mold's own Rust engine running on Metal, and talks to every other mold serve machine you use over the same HTTP API.

Mold Studio for Mac · Latest ReleaseSigned and notarized · Apple Silicon · macOS 26+Mold Studio for Mac · Latest NightlyLatest main build · Apple Silicon · macOS 26+

Open the DMG and drag Mold Studio to Applications. It is signed, notarized, and stapled, so there is no quarantine step. Mold Studio updates itself through Sparkle: Mold ▸ Check for Updates… sits under About Mold. Latest Release always downloads the newest stable build; Latest Nightly always downloads the newest build from main. Version-pinned DMGs and SHA256SUMS remain on the releases page.

Coming from the Tauri desktop app?

Mold Studio installs as Mold Studio.app; the older cross-platform desktop app is Mold.app. Both can sit in /Applications at once while you move over. The Tauri app is still published as the legacy Mac download for Macs that cannot run macOS 26, and remains the default desktop app on Windows and Linux.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). There is no Intel build.
• macOS 26 or newer.

What it does

• Generate — every control comes from the chosen model's own generation profile: stills and clips, source and reference images, batches, negative prompts, adapters, identity photos, masks, ControlNet, and prompt expansion. Live step progress and denoise preview; images, clips, and meshes are shown in place. The controls stay anchored above the bottom edge and scroll inside their capsule when the window is short.
• Library — every machine's prints in one day-sectioned timeline, with a print held on several machines shown once. Favourites, collections, tags, search tokens (is:video, tag:name, on:machine), Quick Look, undo, interactive 3-D mesh viewing and export, and Use These Settings to restore a print's full recipe. Select prints and choose Move to Collection → New Collection… to create a collection from the selection. Hidden collection members stay out of general browsing even when a local copy leads; the collection itself and Recently Deleted remain accessible. Context menus keep their rows stable while background transfer status changes.
• Queue — every machine's work live from its event stream: reorder, pause, resume, cancel, and move held jobs between machines. Source thumbnails reserve their image and caption space while loading; jobs without retained source media remain compact. Batch groups expand into individually selectable jobs, with disclosure separate from the batch actions.
• Models — installed models grouped by family, catalog discovery, and downloads with gated-licence acceptance in place.
• Machines — the fleet at a glance, per-GPU memory and load, nearby machines to add, and phone pairing for keyed hosts.
• This Mac — mold's engine starts in-process when the app opens (Settings ▸ This Mac turns that off) and joins the machine list like any other host.

To choose the port for This Mac, select it in Settings ▸ Performance ▸ Port and relaunch Mold Studio. The address in Machines shows the port actually in use. If another process already uses the chosen port, the engine reports the conflict; choose a free port with mold config set server_port <port> before starting it again.

Not in Mold Studio (by design or not yet): authoring scripted sequences (CLI and API only), RunPod provisioning, and the 3-D authoring workflows.

Working in Generate

Drag the handle above the prompt upward to make the editor taller, or Control-click it for size options. Your preferred height is remembered and fits the available window space. Drag the settings inspector divider to change its width; click any section heading to show or hide its controls. Recent prompts initially shows five items, with search and Show more for older entries. Choosing a recent prompt keeps your other settings.

Random each time chooses a new seed for every submission. Keep this seed reuses the displayed starting number; New seed chooses another without generating. A batch uses successive seeds to make variations.

Generate shows preparation and sending progress immediately, then confirms when the machine accepts the job or explains why it could not. An accepted job may start generating or wait in the queue. When reusing a print, Stop restoring original inputs keeps your prompt, settings and attached files while removing references that could not be restored. It does not delete Library files; attach any required replacement inputs before generating.

Job Details groups progress, preview and settings, with copyable identifiers under Technical details. Hover over controls for a plain-English explanation.

Keyboard

⌘1–⌘5 switch destinations, ⌘↩ generates, ⌘R refreshes, ⌥⌘I toggles the inspector, Space is Quick Look, ⌥⌘F favourites, ⌘⌫ trashes a print or cancels the selected queue row, and ⌘, opens Settings.

For contributors

The source lives in apps/macos/; its README covers building, the embedded engine, releasing, and the Sparkle feeds. For distribution builds, make engine passes the app's resolved marketing version as MOLD_BUILD_VERSION to Rust. This keeps the version reported by This Mac and /api/status aligned with About Mold Studio on Nightly; ordinary Rust builds use the workspace package version.

In Library, Media Type filters the current shelf to All Media, Photos, Videos or 3D while keeping search and machine filters. Multi-select with Command-click or Shift-click without recentering tiles already in view. Arrow-key navigation still reveals offscreen selections.

References and boundary frames

Both native apps expose the server's reference contracts. MiniMax H3 Ref2VA takes an ordered mixture of images, H.264 MP4 clips and mono/stereo PCM WAV audio; image references can come from Photos/Camera/Library/Share on iOS or Finder/Library/Paste on macOS, and movie/audio files use Files/Finder. Replace, remove and reorder attachments before generating. Use image 1, video 1 and audio 1 in the prompt (numbered within each media kind). Audio references need at least one visual reference. The limits are nine images, three videos, three audio files and twelve files total; each clip is 2–15 seconds, with at most 15 seconds of video and 15 seconds of audio including video soundtracks. Authenticated hosts use request-bound upload sessions; keyless hosts accept at most 32 MiB of inline reference media per render. Video clips with sound require authenticated uploads so the server can supply exact decoded soundtrack counts; on keyless hosts use a silent MP4 plus separate PCM WAV audio. Unsupported or oversized files report an error instead of silently disappearing.

Hunyuan3D multiview models offer named Front/Left/Back/Right wells from their recipe. Wan offers a first/last pair rather than arbitrary middle frames; MiniMax FL2VA offers separate optional first/last frames. Changing clip length updates the closing frame. Existing Qwen Edit, Qwen Image 2.1 and Flux.2 reference strips honor their source-image relation, count and pixel budgets; the last Qwen Image 2.1 reference updates the default canvas until you choose a size. SD1.5/SDXL reference weight comes from the model's own control. Model changes park unsupported attachments so they can return. Reuse restores retained typed references with fresh media authority while their original set and order stay unchanged. Changing retained slots requires reattaching the remaining originals; archived bytes never overwrite new attachments. Imported mesh texture/roundtrip workflows remain API/CLI-only.

Recalling retained recipes

Reused ordered image references have authenticated previews. Prompt, shape and seed changes preserve the unchanged reference set, and each render gets fresh authority. If retained slots are reordered, removed or replaced, attach the remaining originals before generating. Preview failures offer Retry and do not discard the references. Shape menus show the actual aspect outline.

The app stores a byte-free origin locator for retained recipes. After relaunch it verifies the original machine instance, archive and output before enabling Generate. If verification fails, reconnect and reselect the source print, replace the attachments, or explicitly discard retained conditioning. Upload sessions and retained-source permissions are never saved as reusable authority.

Local authoring inputs are saved privately with your prompt and scalar settings. Attached images, masks, references, audio/video, first/last frames and parked inputs survive relaunch. Unresolved retained references still require verification on their original machine. A save failure asks you to keep Mold open; missing or corrupt saved inputs block Generate until you reattach the files you need and choose Use current inputs. Previously lost local attachments cannot be recovered by this change, though Use These Settings can recover originals retained with a Library print.

Native shipping builds include the reviewed Metal H3 engine; remote generation uses the selected host's capabilities.

Save All to This Mac copies retained inputs with every supported output type, independently of model family. The destination owns the source, identity, mask/control, edit/typed references, audio/video, keyframes, continuation and chain stage media, so reuse does not need the original machine. Incomplete source transfers are reported as failures. Reusing sequence settings restores the first stage's source; later stages remain in the copied archive. Rebuilding the complete authored sequence remains a separate workflow.

Queue, discovery and video preferences

Click a job in Queue to see its source, settings and live progress or preview where the model supports it. The seed reads Random until a random job has an actual seed; explicitly locked zero remains valid.

Discover opens with manifest models from the selected machine. Choose Browse Community Catalog, search, or filter by family for community results. Load More Models shows the current result count in a prominent footer.

In Settings → General → Video Playback, choose autoplay and repeat. Videos use inline controls without the full-video hover overlay. Video and 3-D GIF export provide Loop/Bounce, Forever/Once and pause settings when applicable.

New oversized input pictures are fitted proportionally, with orientation and transparency preserved. Paired remote connections prefer verified LAN routes over Tailscale and relay and recheck when the network changes.