sonilo-cli

Command-line interface for the Sonilo API — generate music and sound effects from text or video.

Install

pip install sonilo-cli

Auth

Set your API key once:

export SONILO_API_KEY=sk-...

or pass --api-key sk-... on any command.

Commands

sonilo account                     # plan limits and available services
sonilo usage --days 7              # usage summary
sonilo text-to-music --prompt "warm lo-fi piano, rain" --duration 30
sonilo video-to-music --video clip.mp4 --prompt "tense synths" --format wav
sonilo text-to-sfx --prompt "glass shattering on concrete" --duration 3
sonilo video-to-sfx --video clip.mp4 --output whoosh.wav
sonilo video-to-sfx --video clip.mp4 --segments @segments.json
sonilo video-to-sound --video clip.mp4 \
    --music-prompt "uplifting orchestral score" --sfx-prompt "match the on-screen action"
sonilo video-to-video-sound --video clip.mp4 --music-prompt "tense synths"
sonilo dubbing --video-url https://example.com/clip.mp4 --languages es,fr --output dubbed.mp4
# writes dubbed.es.mp4 and dubbed.fr.mp4
sonilo tasks get <task-id>
sonilo tasks wait <task-id> --poll-interval 2 --timeout 600

Notes

• text-to-music / video-to-music stream a short .m4a by default. --format wav, --isolate-vocals, and --preserve-speech each switch to the async submit-and-poll path.
• text-to-sfx / video-to-sfx are always async; --format accepts wav|mp3|aac|flac.
• Output defaults to ./output.<ext>; override with --output.

Segments

--segments scores a timeline instead of one whole-clip prompt. It takes a JSON array, in one of three forms — inline, from a file, or from stdin:

sonilo text-to-music --prompt "warm lo-fi piano" --duration 30 \
    --segments '[{"start":0,"label":"intro","prompt":"airy pads"}]'
sonilo video-to-sfx --video clip.mp4 --segments @segments.json
jq -c '.cues' storyboard.json | sonilo video-to-sfx --video clip.mp4 --segments @-

A value starting with @ names a source to read the JSON from, and @- reads standard input — the same convention as curl, gh and aws. Anything else is parsed as JSON directly.

The two segment shapes are not interchangeable:

• start / end are seconds from the start of the track or clip.
• Passing one shape to a command that takes the other is rejected before any request is made, with a message naming the shape that command expects.
• Only the shape is checked locally. Timing rules — the first segment starting at 0, minimum spacing between segments, the label vocabulary, how many segments are allowed — are enforced by the API, which answers with a 422 describing what it rejected.
• Keys the CLI does not recognise are forwarded as-is, so a newly added API field works without upgrading the CLI.
• text-to-sfx takes no segments (its output is a single effect, not a timeline).

Combined soundtracks

video-to-sound and video-to-video-sound score a clip with a music bed and sound effects in one call (one charge, instead of chaining two requests). Both are async-only and take the same options — they differ only in what comes back: video-to-sound writes the mixed audio (default output.wav), video-to-video-sound writes the source video with that audio muxed in (default output.mp4).

sonilo video-to-sound --video clip.mp4 \
    --music-prompt "uplifting orchestral score" \
    --sfx-prompt "match the on-screen action" \
    --output soundtrack.wav --stem music --stem sfx

• --music-prompt / --sfx-prompt steer the two layers separately; both are optional.
• --segments places individual effects on the timeline, in the SFX shape {start, end, prompt} — see Segments.
• --preserve-speech keeps speech from the source video in the mix.
• Ducking is on by default (music dips under speech). Pass --no-ducking to opt out — omitting the flag leaves the server default untouched.
• --stem is repeatable (music, music_processed, sfx) and saves the individual layers next to the combined output, so you can re-balance the mix yourself. With --output soundtrack.wav, the music stem lands at soundtrack.music.m4a. music_processed exists only when --preserve-speech or ducking altered the music bed.

Dubbing

dubbing dubs a video into one or more target languages in a single async call:

sonilo dubbing --video-url https://example.com/clip.mp4 --languages es,fr --output dubbed.mp4
# writes dubbed.es.mp4 and dubbed.fr.mp4

• --languages is comma-separated; omit it to use the server default zh_cn,es,fr. Supported codes: en, zh_cn, ja, ko, pt, es, de, fr, it, ru.
• Source videos may be at most 180 seconds long.
• --output is a filename template, not a single destination: a dubbing task returns one video per language, so --output clip.mp4 writes clip.es.mp4, clip.fr.mp4, etc.
• Billing is per language, and dubbing has no free trial runs — see Free trial below.
• --timeout defaults to 7200 seconds, matching the backend's own ceiling for a dubbing job (far longer than other commands' default, since dubbing can run well past the usual tasks wait --timeout 600). If the wait still times out, the task keeps running server-side — resume watching it with sonilo tasks wait <task-id>.

Free trial

Accounts created through self-serve signup start with free runs on most endpoints — no card required:

Dubbing bills video duration × number of languages, so a free run on it would be worth far more than a free run on any other endpoint — it has no free allowance and bills from the first call.

The table above is the current default. sonilo account prints the live numbers: the account JSON goes to stdout, and when the account has a free-trial allowance one summary line goes to stderr:

Free trial: text-to-music 1/2 left, video-to-music 0/1 left

Because the summary is on stderr, sonilo account | jq .trial still sees clean JSON.

Once an endpoint's free runs are used up, calls to it bill at the normal rate — or, if the account has never been funded, fail with HTTP 402: ... (trial_exhausted) until a payment method is added. That is the one 402 a retry can never fix.