diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 5353ed6..193c152 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -20,6 +20,7 @@ Distributed and FP16 support relies on work by Christian Sarofeen and NVIDIA's
 2. Clone this repo: `git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2.git`
 3. CD into this repo: `cd tacotron2`
 4. Update .wav paths: `sed -i -- 's,DUMMY,ljs_dataset_folder/wavs,g' filelists/*.txt`
+    - Alternatively, set `load_mel_from_disk=True` in `hparams.py` and update mel-spectrogram paths 
 5. Install [pytorch 0.4](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch)
 6. Install python requirements or build docker image 
     - Install python requirements: `pip install -r requirements.txt`
diff --git a/data_utils.py b/data_utils.py
index 786a282..09f42ac 100644
--- a/data_utils.py
+++ b/data_utils.py
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 import random
+import numpy as np
 import torch
 import torch.utils.data
 
@@ -19,6 +20,7 @@ class TextMelLoader(torch.utils.data.Dataset):
         self.text_cleaners = hparams.text_cleaners
         self.max_wav_value = hparams.max_wav_value
         self.sampling_rate = hparams.sampling_rate
+        self.load_mel_from_disk = hparams.load_mel_from_disk
         self.stft = layers.TacotronSTFT(
             hparams.filter_length, hparams.hop_length, hparams.win_length,
             hparams.n_mel_channels, hparams.sampling_rate, hparams.mel_fmin,
@@ -35,12 +37,19 @@ class TextMelLoader(torch.utils.data.Dataset):
         return (text, mel)
 
     def get_mel(self, filename):
-        audio = load_wav_to_torch(filename, self.sampling_rate)
-        audio_norm = audio / self.max_wav_value
-        audio_norm = audio_norm.unsqueeze(0)
-        audio_norm = torch.autograd.Variable(audio_norm, requires_grad=False)
-        melspec = self.stft.mel_spectrogram(audio_norm)
-        melspec = torch.squeeze(melspec, 0)
+        if not self.load_mel_from_disk:
+            audio = load_wav_to_torch(filename, self.sampling_rate)
+            audio_norm = audio / self.max_wav_value
+            audio_norm = audio_norm.unsqueeze(0)
+            audio_norm = torch.autograd.Variable(audio_norm, requires_grad=False)
+            melspec = self.stft.mel_spectrogram(audio_norm)
+            melspec = torch.squeeze(melspec, 0)
+        else:
+            melspec = torch.from_numpy(np.load(filename))
+            assert melspec.size(0) == self.stft.n_mel_channels, (
+                'Mel dimension mismatch: given {}, expected {}'.format(
+                    melspec.size(0), self.stft.n_mel_channels))
+
         return melspec
 
     def get_text(self, text):
diff --git a/hparams.py b/hparams.py
index c5379cb..f692fa0 100644
--- a/hparams.py
+++ b/hparams.py
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@ def create_hparams(hparams_string=None, verbose=False):
         ################################
         # Data Parameters             #
         ################################
+        load_mel_from_disk=False,
         training_files='filelists/ljs_audio_text_train_filelist.txt',
         validation_files='filelists/ljs_audio_text_val_filelist.txt',
         text_cleaners=['english_cleaners'],