Aria piano-MIDI AI runs on Windows 11 with an RTX 4060, 8GB

Aria stands out from earlier piano-generation work by data scale: EleutherAI trained it on roughly 60,000 hours of filtered solo-piano recordings transcribed to MIDI, compared with about 200 hours for MAESTRO and about 1,237 hours for GiantMIDI-Piano (these compare datasets with model training data, so conditions are not identical). That data comes from real performances, so the model learns timing and dynamics rooted in actual playing. The author notes Aria is sensitive to input quality and is designed to continue an existing MIDI rather than compose from scratch, and that it has no RLHF-style instruction tuning, so text commands like 'bright' or 'sonata form' do not work. The guide's practical contribution is accessibility: earlier public setup instructions centered on Linux, and this walkthrough packages the model for Windows 11 with a consumer GPU. It uses a script that loads the model in fp16 to fit 8GB of VRAM and lets the user pick an input MIDI and a number of variations, offering a lower-friction path for local experimentation than the TensorFlow-based Music Transformer lineage that preceded Aria.