Scenema-Audio: Gibberish Output and Hugging Face SSL/403 Download error

A user reports that running Scenema Audio locally with Podman produces gibberish output and fails to download the ~4.9 GB transformer checkpoint from Hugging Face due to SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED, Read timed out, and 403 Forbidden errors. The user's Hugging Face token works and corporate CA certificates are installed, but the download still fails, prompting a request for fixes.

Hi people, I’m trying to run Scenema Audio locally with Podman. I’m facing two issues: Gibberish output: The model generates unintelligible audio instead of the expected speech. Hugging Face download: The ~4.9 GB transformer checkpoint fails with SSL: CERTIFICATE VERIFY FAILED, Read timed out, and eventually 403 Forbidden – Make sure your token has the correct permissions. My Hugging Face token is working whoami returns successfully , and I’ve also added the corporate CA certificate provided by IT. A direct HTTPS test to Hugging Face returns 200, but the model download still fails. Has anyone faced these issues or knows the correct fix, particularly for the HF CDN/Xet download?