I'm really curious how the traditional DAW features stack up against the incumbents. A good DAW has a ton of features. Developing a whole DAW from scratch just to add a "generate part" button sounds like a lot.
I split pretty evenly between Bitwig, Logic X, and MuseScore and I can tell you the first big reservation I have with something like this is that it's an online DAW.
What does that mean? It means that your compositions (outside of bouncing them down to audio stems) exists within a highly proprietary SaaS format and that the moment you stop paying, you've got NOTHING.
99% of major DAWs (Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, Bitwig, Studio One, etc.) are a perpetual license.
I wasn't expecting to, but I got chills listening to some Suno creations from artists who are clearly very talented at using this new medium.
Much like those of us hammering away at LLMs who eventually get incredible results through persistence, people are doing the same with these other AI tools, creating in an entirely new way.
I'm sure Suno are working hard on this and these AI tools can only come together as fast as we can figure out the UX for all this stuff, but I'm holding out for when I can guide the music with specific melodies using voice or midi.
For "conventional" musicians, we (or at least I) would love to have that level of control. Often we know exactly what it should sound like, but might not have session musicians or expensive VSTs (or patience) on hand to get exactly the sound we want. Currently we make do with what we have - but this tech could allow many to take their existing productions to the next level.
What I've tend to find is that although almost everyone listens to some form of music, the average person tends to like things which are squarely in the middle of the gaussian curve, and that are inherently very predictable as though the creator had chosen the most stastically likely outcome for every creative decision they made while creating it. Similar trends with almost anything creative, cinema, literature, food etc.
This is basically what all the Suno creations sound like to me, which is to say they definitely have a market, but that market isn't for people who have a more than average interest in music.
While I like using AI for assisting with repetitive programming, I can’t help but feel sorry for my producer and illustrator friends who are now having to compete with generated tools.
Is it snobby of me to look down upon art that is created using these tools as lesser because the human did not make every tiny decision going into a peice? That a persons taste and talent is no longer fully used to produce something and for someone reason to me what is what makes the art impressive and meaningful?
Something about art with imperfections still feels exciting, maybe even more so than if I see something that is perfect but if I see an AI gen picture with 6 fingers, I just write it all off as slop.
I am happy to allow my generated code to come from “training data” but I see the use of AI in art, writing and music as using stolen artists hard work.
I feel like as time goes on, I feel even more conflicted about it all.
Nothing is being "stolen". It never was. Copyright law grants you rights over specific works. It doesn't protect styles, genres, general ideas, methods, or concepts. And it most certainly doesn't protect anyone from competition or the unyielding march of progress. Nothing can protect you from that.
What's special about Suno 5 is that the songs are actually good to listen to in place of professionally produced songs. For example, my favorite genre is new jack swing and there is a very limited number of this genre as it was briefly popular during the 90s. Now I have an endless supply of it and you can't tell that its AI produced anymore. Sure to an expert they might be able to detect it but for consumers its just as good as spotify playlist.
This is the first time I'm actually paying for generated AI content because the value I get is immense. I really think we are headed towards and over supply of content where there will be more stuff to read, watch, listen with very real value in all of them.
This spells out the inevitable change in the labor market for content creators. There will always be value for human created content and some will make more money but it will always have the AI generated content generation competing with it to the point where it will be hard to stay ahead and eventually people will stop caring.
Case in point, I see some comments being snarkish towards Suno but for as a consumer I could care less if you put your soul and years into producing art vs the one I can get a lot of today and now especially when there is virtually no difference in quality.
Truly an amazing accomplishment from Suno team, and probably the first time I've subbed to a music service after decades of downloading mp3s, hunting down new songs to listen to on Youtube. Suno 'steamified" this process and while I will use youtube to discover new genre, I am spending now most of my time in Suno, listening to endless amount of the exact sound I am looking for.
> I really think we are headed towards and over supply of content where there will be more stuff to read, watch, listen with very real value in all of them.
> as a consumer I could care less if you put your soul and years into producing art vs the one I can get a lot of today and now especially when there is virtually no difference in quality
Before AI there was a general consensus that creative areas (eg. Cities) were becoming a homogenized experience. A Starbuckization if you will. I can’t help but wonder what gets lost when using tools like this.
Since you get exactly the kind of music you want, I think it leads to extremely small bubbles, which is pretty much the opposite of homogeneity.
For example, I had never heard epic power metal about birds, but with Suno I got exactly what I wanted. Sure, the sound quality (I only used v3.5) could be better and the songs could be longer, but I don’t care, I now have epic songs about my Bourke’s parakeet. However, I’m not pretentious enough to think those songs are interesting to anyone other than my wife and me, hence the smallness of the bubble.
If no one is creating new music/styles for the models to steal, you will only get remixes of what already exists. AI is an entropy machine, it sucks all of the energy/momentum out of everything it touches.
Suno is moving toward becoming a browser-based DAW that happens to use AI. There are already more capable and established DAWs, and I see no reason they can't implement AI into their workflows-- in a more precise manner, where it's actually useful, instead of wholesale as a gimmick. Many are already doing this. So I don't understand where Suno is going with any of this.
It either needs to be:
1. So easy anyone can press a button and magically get exactly what they want with perfect accuracy and quality.
2. So robust and powerful it enables new kinds of music production and super-charges human producers.
This is neither. And I don't buy Suno's argument that they're solving a real problem here. Creative people don't hate the process of creating art-- it's the process itself and the personal expression that make it worthwhile. And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
> Creative people don't hate the process of creating art
I mean, I hate when it's difficult to get the medium to express my vision... not that AI especially would help with that when I'm actually attached to that vision in detail....
"Creative people don't hate the process of creating art"
Yep. I was a professional music producer before the pandemics, and I couldn't agree more.
Honestly, I'm glad we are destroying every way possible to earn money with music, so we find another profession for that purpose and then we can make music for fun and love again.
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Respectfully I disagree. We have had curated, manufactured pop, built by committee and sung by pretty mouthpieces with no emotional connection, for a long time now, and they make big money.
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Strong disagree there. I think that's true of a very small % of consumers nowadays. I mean, total honesty, I think that Suno is not worse than a large fraction of the commercial pop made by humans (maybe) that tops the charts regularly. It's already extremely formula based artificial music made by professional hit makers from Sweden or Korea.
The objective was never to grab discerning listeners but the mass of people. It would work even if they grab 50% but honestly I think it's going to be higher.
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Um, have you seen the pop charts at any time in the past... well, since forever, actually?
The majority of commercially produced music today is created with intent to take your money and nothing else, with performers little more than actors lip-syncing to the same tired beat. Because it sells.
It's human nature to want to feel like we've accomplished something. AI generaters like Suno, where all you have to do is type in a prompt and you get the final result, take that sense of accomplishment away from us.
However, if we start working on a project where we're assisted by AI, for example, we're making a game where the sprites are generated by AI or the background music is generated by AI, but the overall game is still directed by humans, that sense of accomplishment stays.
But at some point we're going to reach the stage where the entire game can be generated in high quality, at the same level as humans. What then?
How is the stem support these days? In particular I would like to create some songs with vocals (my lyrics), then be able to remove the vocal track and replace it with my own.
I've been working on an AI detector for the last few months. Updated it to handle Suno V5 on Wednesday - looks like it's very similar to V4.5. Am curious to see how this Studio version impacts the model I've trained.
Well there's now a polka about diarrhea after eating spicy food. And a rock ballad duet about macaroni and cheese with a female singer and a screamo male part.
Meanwhile I've mixed a song of mine down on a Tascam 688 8-track tape recorder. I have a big smile on my face because I find this very enjoyable. The haptics, the sound and my hand-crafted product. A piece of art made by a human. No AI will replace this for me.
I consider myself an amateur musician and pulled a decent side hustle teaching piano back in university. I also worked the occasional gig as a cocktail pianist.
I've actually had a lot of fun using tools like Suno/Udio as a means of sonic exploration to see how some of my older compositions would sound in different mediums.
When I composed this piece of classical music practically a decade ago, it was intended for strings but at the time I only played piano so that's where it stayed. By increasing the "Audio Influence Slider", Suno arranged it in a chamber quartet style but stayed nearly 1:1 faithful with the original in terms of melody / structure.
Tools like Suno are fundamentally enabling. I'm about 40 years old and never "had the music" - not for lack of trying (music lessons at a young age)... but could never carry a tune or keep rhythm. I suppose its what being dyslexic feels like. If I were educated in a culture where music was fundamentally as important as reading or math, I suppose would have spent enough hours on it to eventually be passable... but I got frustrated, the music lessons stopped. But that doesn't mean I stopped appreciating or wanting to make music!
And then comes Suno (and OpenAI's jukebox before that), and it felt like my brain exploded... like the classic scene in a superhero movie when the power was given to me. Is my music good? No - but I spent years writing and fashioning poetry and all of a sudden can put that to music... hard to explain how awesome that feels. and i love using the tools and it's getting better and it's been fundamentally empowering. I know it's easy to say generative art is generative swill... but "learning Suno" is no different than "learning guitar".
> but "learning Suno" is no different than "learning guitar".
You downplay the training it takes to actually use your body to output the notes. With the guitar your fingers have to "learn" as much as your brain on a scale that no prompt input will ever match. And I say that as a musician that use mostly sequencers to compose.
> I know it's easy to say generative art is generative swill... but "learning Suno" is no different than "learning guitar".
all the discourse with this remark is quite fascinating as an observer. similar remarks used to be said about electronic music or just use of conventional daw when they were new.
to those who have dedicated years into their craft: one must not mix self-expression from the mechanics of getting there. it is very respectable to dedicate one's life to the analogue way. but if something lets you get there in a different way, allow it.
Without a doubt, Suno Studio boasts some impressive features. One of the introductory videos features a voice-to-saxophone demonstration. The result sounded surprisingly good to me and was perfectly usable.
I wonder how AI-assisted music production like Suno will change the profession of being a musician. I think people want their favorite music artists to be real humans they can relate to. For that reason, I guess real singers won't be out of a job anytime soon. The same may apply to performers of real musical instruments. No one wants to see music played entirely from a computer during a live concert.
However, I predict that it will be very difficult to become even moderately well-known as a musician by just being a Suno Studio creator alone. A lot of good-sounding content will be created this way, and if an artist can't perform live or doesn't have a unique persona or story to attract an audience, it'll be hard to stand out from the endless mass of AI-generated content.
These things are the composition equivalent of Guitar Hero...
They give users (players?) a sense of agency, making it satisfying. But in reality, you're no more composing than a guitar-hero player is playing the guitar, and nor will you learn how to from doing so. No matter how sophisticated the transformations in an LLM, you're ultimately using other people's music in a sophisticated mashup game.
However, in guitar hero, the people's who's music was being used at least got royalties. :-/
57 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadWhat does that mean? It means that your compositions (outside of bouncing them down to audio stems) exists within a highly proprietary SaaS format and that the moment you stop paying, you've got NOTHING.
99% of major DAWs (Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, Bitwig, Studio One, etc.) are a perpetual license.
Much like those of us hammering away at LLMs who eventually get incredible results through persistence, people are doing the same with these other AI tools, creating in an entirely new way.
I'm sure Suno are working hard on this and these AI tools can only come together as fast as we can figure out the UX for all this stuff, but I'm holding out for when I can guide the music with specific melodies using voice or midi.
For "conventional" musicians, we (or at least I) would love to have that level of control. Often we know exactly what it should sound like, but might not have session musicians or expensive VSTs (or patience) on hand to get exactly the sound we want. Currently we make do with what we have - but this tech could allow many to take their existing productions to the next level.
This is basically what all the Suno creations sound like to me, which is to say they definitely have a market, but that market isn't for people who have a more than average interest in music.
Is it snobby of me to look down upon art that is created using these tools as lesser because the human did not make every tiny decision going into a peice? That a persons taste and talent is no longer fully used to produce something and for someone reason to me what is what makes the art impressive and meaningful?
Something about art with imperfections still feels exciting, maybe even more so than if I see something that is perfect but if I see an AI gen picture with 6 fingers, I just write it all off as slop.
I am happy to allow my generated code to come from “training data” but I see the use of AI in art, writing and music as using stolen artists hard work.
I feel like as time goes on, I feel even more conflicted about it all.
This is the first time I'm actually paying for generated AI content because the value I get is immense. I really think we are headed towards and over supply of content where there will be more stuff to read, watch, listen with very real value in all of them.
This spells out the inevitable change in the labor market for content creators. There will always be value for human created content and some will make more money but it will always have the AI generated content generation competing with it to the point where it will be hard to stay ahead and eventually people will stop caring.
Case in point, I see some comments being snarkish towards Suno but for as a consumer I could care less if you put your soul and years into producing art vs the one I can get a lot of today and now especially when there is virtually no difference in quality.
Truly an amazing accomplishment from Suno team, and probably the first time I've subbed to a music service after decades of downloading mp3s, hunting down new songs to listen to on Youtube. Suno 'steamified" this process and while I will use youtube to discover new genre, I am spending now most of my time in Suno, listening to endless amount of the exact sound I am looking for.
We're already here with human created content.
as a fellow consumer I care a lot actually
> my favorite genre is new jack swing
My friend, where do you think your favorite genre that AI is now parroting comes from…
For example, I had never heard epic power metal about birds, but with Suno I got exactly what I wanted. Sure, the sound quality (I only used v3.5) could be better and the songs could be longer, but I don’t care, I now have epic songs about my Bourke’s parakeet. However, I’m not pretentious enough to think those songs are interesting to anyone other than my wife and me, hence the smallness of the bubble.
It either needs to be: 1. So easy anyone can press a button and magically get exactly what they want with perfect accuracy and quality. 2. So robust and powerful it enables new kinds of music production and super-charges human producers.
This is neither. And I don't buy Suno's argument that they're solving a real problem here. Creative people don't hate the process of creating art-- it's the process itself and the personal expression that make it worthwhile. And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
I mean, I hate when it's difficult to get the medium to express my vision... not that AI especially would help with that when I'm actually attached to that vision in detail....
Yep. I was a professional music producer before the pandemics, and I couldn't agree more.
Honestly, I'm glad we are destroying every way possible to earn money with music, so we find another profession for that purpose and then we can make music for fun and love again.
Respectfully I disagree. We have had curated, manufactured pop, built by committee and sung by pretty mouthpieces with no emotional connection, for a long time now, and they make big money.
And look at the vocaloid stuff too.
Those who care, care. Everyone else?
Strong disagree there. I think that's true of a very small % of consumers nowadays. I mean, total honesty, I think that Suno is not worse than a large fraction of the commercial pop made by humans (maybe) that tops the charts regularly. It's already extremely formula based artificial music made by professional hit makers from Sweden or Korea.
The objective was never to grab discerning listeners but the mass of people. It would work even if they grab 50% but honestly I think it's going to be higher.
Um, have you seen the pop charts at any time in the past... well, since forever, actually?
The majority of commercially produced music today is created with intent to take your money and nothing else, with performers little more than actors lip-syncing to the same tired beat. Because it sells.
they can be (albeit web-based) the "davinci resolve" of DAW, regardless of whether the AI features be bundled away for the paid plans.
However, if we start working on a project where we're assisted by AI, for example, we're making a game where the sprites are generated by AI or the background music is generated by AI, but the overall game is still directed by humans, that sense of accomplishment stays.
But at some point we're going to reach the stage where the entire game can be generated in high quality, at the same level as humans. What then?
For voice removal I use Ultimate Vocal Track Remover, is on Github.
If you want to test it, here's the link: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker
Looks like the "covers" need some better instrument isolation, but this is really huge for the music industry.
Yup totally won't mess with their algorithms.
LOL oh hell no! Why would anyone use this if a perpetual subscription is required to maintain the rights? Absurd.
I've actually had a lot of fun using tools like Suno/Udio as a means of sonic exploration to see how some of my older compositions would sound in different mediums.
When I composed this piece of classical music practically a decade ago, it was intended for strings but at the time I only played piano so that's where it stayed. By increasing the "Audio Influence Slider", Suno arranged it in a chamber quartet style but stayed nearly 1:1 faithful with the original in terms of melody / structure.
Comparison blog piece
https://mordenstar.com/blog/screwdriver-sonata
And then comes Suno (and OpenAI's jukebox before that), and it felt like my brain exploded... like the classic scene in a superhero movie when the power was given to me. Is my music good? No - but I spent years writing and fashioning poetry and all of a sudden can put that to music... hard to explain how awesome that feels. and i love using the tools and it's getting better and it's been fundamentally empowering. I know it's easy to say generative art is generative swill... but "learning Suno" is no different than "learning guitar".
https://open.spotify.com/album/45CY60A8GCHxBQb7DCJsIl
https://songxytr.substack.com/p/what-is-a-songxytr
You downplay the training it takes to actually use your body to output the notes. With the guitar your fingers have to "learn" as much as your brain on a scale that no prompt input will ever match. And I say that as a musician that use mostly sequencers to compose.
all the discourse with this remark is quite fascinating as an observer. similar remarks used to be said about electronic music or just use of conventional daw when they were new.
to those who have dedicated years into their craft: one must not mix self-expression from the mechanics of getting there. it is very respectable to dedicate one's life to the analogue way. but if something lets you get there in a different way, allow it.
I wonder how AI-assisted music production like Suno will change the profession of being a musician. I think people want their favorite music artists to be real humans they can relate to. For that reason, I guess real singers won't be out of a job anytime soon. The same may apply to performers of real musical instruments. No one wants to see music played entirely from a computer during a live concert.
However, I predict that it will be very difficult to become even moderately well-known as a musician by just being a Suno Studio creator alone. A lot of good-sounding content will be created this way, and if an artist can't perform live or doesn't have a unique persona or story to attract an audience, it'll be hard to stand out from the endless mass of AI-generated content.
They give users (players?) a sense of agency, making it satisfying. But in reality, you're no more composing than a guitar-hero player is playing the guitar, and nor will you learn how to from doing so. No matter how sophisticated the transformations in an LLM, you're ultimately using other people's music in a sophisticated mashup game.
However, in guitar hero, the people's who's music was being used at least got royalties. :-/