Show HN: I built an AI music generator with some harnesses (onlymusic.ai)
But I noticed that some people around me — e.g. my girlfriend — also want to create music as a way to express themselves, but often run into a few problems when using AI music tools:
1. They don’t have a music background, so it’s hard for them to clearly describe the sound they want. 2. Sometimes they just want a song in the style of a certain artist, and the easiest way for them to express that is by naming the artist. But an artist’s name isn’t necessarily a useful description of the actual musical characteristics they’re looking for. 3. A lot of interfaces contain professional terms and parameters, like “weirdness,” that aren’t really designed from a normal user’s perspective and can be confusing.
So I built onlymusic.ai and added some harnesses around the underlying models. (Okay, I know “harness” has become a pretty popular word lately.)
In practice, it’s mostly prompt preprocessing, a rule system, and model orchestration.
For prompt-to-song generation, when someone enters something very simple, we transform it in the background using some good prompt patterns we’ve collected. The goal is to preserve what the user actually meant, while translating it into language that the music model can understand better, hopefully improving the generation results.
We also added one-click optimization for styles and lyrics.
For styles, if someone mentions an artist, we translate that into musical characteristics — things like era, instrumentation, rhythm, vocal texture, and production style.
For lyrics, we try to preserve things like the original rhyme, imagery, and intent, while rewriting parts that may not work well for generation.
On the UI side, I’ve also tried to use simple, everyday language wherever possible, remove unnecessary options, and keep only the elements that actually matter, so the interface is cleaner and easier to use.
Finally, a big thanks to open-source models like ACE. We deploy some of the models ourselves, which keeps the cost manageable, so we’re able to offer a pretty generous free tier with no signup required.
In Fast mode, you can generate up to 5 songs without an account. After signing in, you can generate up to 20 songs per day. (That’s for Fast mode — if you use the more capable models, you’ll get fewer generations.) The credits refresh every day.
We’ll keep an eye on the costs. If they become too much, we may have to reduce the free quota a little in the future
There are still a lot of features under development. Feedback is very welcome, and I’d love for you to try it!
I’m also working on a non-form-based lyrics generator right now. Once it’s ready, I’ll share that with you guys too.
7 comments
[ 0.39 ms ] story [ 14.6 ms ] threadOne short question, can you generate the music for other languages such as French or German?
The website UI itself is still English-only for now, but localization is on the roadmap. Enjoy! :)
Then you take it to the next level of insanity with "fast mode"...because creating one song without any knowledge of music is too slow...I need five songs that have no creativity or understanding put into them.
I mean, sort of what is the point of this...I mean this in the nicest way possible? It has no use to somebody who actually understands music and harmony, it has no use to somebody who is talented at poety/lyric writing, it employs no musicians, and deep down if you did "create" a song with this...would you really call it "yours" if you have no idea how it was created or any understanding of it?
There is no understanding of music here, there is just a chatbot that apes existing media as far as I can tell.
also, "weirdness" is definitely not a 'professional' term...in music or any other field. In all my years at music conservatory and gigging professionally nobody ever told me to put 'weirdness' on anything...and if they did, that would be communication between real human musicians that know each other and how each other play basically saying "he dude, go hog wild for a bit and make some noise or something"...to non musicians "weird" can mean something a simple as "minor key arpeggios" because they sound 'creepy'....weirdness could mean totally normal harmony but with a harpsichord or organ sound because to a pop music listener that might sound "weird" but has nothing to do with the harmony.
It would be like saying "build me a web app that does cool web stuff"....doesn't mean literally anything.