VoiceStudio Is AGPL, but Its Default OmniVoice Model Is Non-Commercial

VoiceStudio, a desktop app for voice cloning, dubbing and transcription with 73.3k GitHub stars, is licensed AGPL-3.0, but the default engine it downloads is OmniVoice, whose weights carry a CC-BY-NC licence that bars commercial use. The app's README says so itself: "a paid app licence does not grant those rights."

The gap between the two licences is the story for anyone who read "fully-local ElevenLabs alternative", the README's own description, as permission to sell dubbed audio. The repository belongs to the GitHub user debpalash, and the page names no one else. The Terminal did not install or run the app.

Two licences on one install

The README says the AGPL-3.0 licence "covers the application, including commercial use under its conditions." Model weights, tokenizers, voices and the conditions on generated output are separate.

The default engine is k2-fsa's OmniVoice, a 0.6-billion-parameter text-to-speech model that supports over 600 languages; its tags list 646. Its Hugging Face card says the code is Apache 2.0 but "the pre-trained model is licensed under the CC-BY-NC due to constraints from its training data (e.g., Emilia)." The card showed 1,666,348 downloads in the last month and 1.55k likes, with no access gate.

Layer	Licence	Source
VoiceStudio application	AGPL-3.0	VoiceStudio README
OmniVoice code	Apache-2.0	OmniVoice repository
OmniVoice weights	CC-BY-NC	Hugging Face model card

VoiceStudio's Model Manager shows versioned notices and unresolved review gaps for each model source. The README adds that an optional reviewed-file preview "does not enforce ordinary downloads or certify commercial permission." Nothing stops the download; the licence question is left to the user.

What the README says about consent

The consent guidance is one sentence: "Clone voices only with permission." The README describes no technical check on reference audio. The OmniVoice repository, which has 14.7k stars, goes further in words, saying users are "strictly prohibited from using this model for unauthorized voice cloning." It recommends a reference clip of about 3 to 10 seconds.

The README contains no quality or price comparison with ElevenLabs, so the positioning claim is unverified in either direction.

What 93 open issues show

The issue tracker lists 93 open issues and 115 open pull requests. Issue 2586, pinned and opened Oct. 2, 2026 with 41 comments, asks contributors to sign a contributor licence agreement. Issue 2942, opened Oct. 16, reports that runtime setup crashes with exit code 3221225477 on a CPU-only machine, and issues 2960 and 2957 report the same exit code from the backend on Oct. 17.

The CPU path matters because the README says the app is "fully usable on the CPU, slower", with setup installing a PyTorch build that needs about 5 GB of free disk. Windows on ARM is marked experimental and CPU only; Intel Macs get the interface only and must connect to a remote backend. Issue 2937, opened Oct. 16, says the scrubber that cleans bug reports misses a home directory path when punctuation follows it.

What a user has to check

The README's last version marker is 0.5.3, the final Tauri release, with Electron now the only desktop build. A reader planning commercial output has one task: open the Model Manager's notice for the specific engine, not the app licence. The earlier DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 report covered weights under a plain MIT licence, which is the opposite case. The Orca coverage explains why a star count of this size says little about who is using a project or under what terms.