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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.
  • 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.

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.