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.

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".

https://open.spotify.com/album/45CY60A8GCHxBQb7DCJsIl

https://songxytr.substack.com/p/what-is-a-songxytr

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.

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.

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 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.

Comparison blog piece

https://mordenstar.com/blog/screwdriver-sonata

DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation (to save anyone else who didn't know from looking it up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation

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.

Yup totally won't mess with their algorithms.

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.

If you want to test it, here's the link: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker

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.

Hard pass on a generative AI company trying to reinvent a DAW. Make VST/VSTis please.

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.

Nice, I commented looking for this last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40588038

Looks like the "covers" need some better instrument isolation, but this is really huge for the music industry.

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.

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.

This is an excellent example of where AI-assisted pro music production needs to go. Five months ago there was an HN post on Suno's prompt-based music authoring and I asked for exactly this.

> "I have little interest in typing a text prompt and getting a complete song as an output. However, I will gladly pay serious money for a tool that interactively collaborates with me in a granular, iterative process of generating, adjusting and mixing individual instruments and sections toward a finished multi-track song project." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873781

It's clearly early beta and some key elements still aren't there - like optionally getting dry tracks (no effects) and MIDI output for generated solo instrument tracks - but Suno is absolutely headed in the right direction. So... congrats to the team. I'm excited! Although I recently retired and no longer have a studio, big budget or session players - I also no longer have the client, the client's "wife with great ideas" and a hard deadline. But I've still got passion, experience and a good ear along with more time to explore creatively interesting directions. Vibe coding is fun but extrapolating forward from the Suno Studio demo video, it's clear Vibe Producing has the potential to be amazing.

ASKS: I'd also love to see the ability to collaboratively evolve one aspect of a generated instrument track while holding most other aspects constant. This is how we'd work in the studio with session players. Stuff like "That's almost it... but give me a few variations with a trill at the end like this clip but played with the sultry sound of the trumpet in this clip."

CONCERNS: My concerns are similar to the gaps experienced devs report with coding AIs being like "a junior developer with a bad memory and a parakeet's focus." If Suno Studio's AI is granular enough to collaboratively evolve its generated tracks over several iterations without losing sight of what's good about them, then it'll be productively useful. The only other significant concern is Suno Studio being it's own web-based DAW. A real DAW like Cubase or Bitwig is Hard. A browser-based tool is going to quickly run into thorny challenges around sample-accurate, jitter-free audio I/O, multi-track disk buffering, real-time effects, sub-mixes, ASIO plugins, etc. And none of that intractable mess of heavy-lifting is required for Suno to deliver their core value prop.

STRATEGY: If I was having a beer with Suno Studio's PM Henry Phipps, I'd be encouraging him to either partner with or buy a mature, cross-platform DAW that's already solved those problems. The "buy" strategy has obvious benefits in quickly side stepping all the challenges of browser-based pro audio tools as well as securing an installed base of experienced producers used to paying real money for real tools. The partnering strategy seems cheaper and easier but, in my experience, doing it well is harder. I'd suggest working with one leading DAW but developing an open API to enable seamless workflows between traditional DAWs and AI services. Such an API would let Suno focus on what Suno does best while letting DAW makers avoid having to become competitively competent in neural nets, licensing tagged training data and running cloud GPU services profitably. No DAW developer has the capital (or access to capital) to seriously compete in those domains. Whether through acquisition or partnership, the long-term silver-lining for Suno may be gaining deep experience in digital media production tooling, workflows and customer mindsets.

i wonder what https://www.renoise.com/ would be like like this

> Commercial use rights for songs made while subscribed

LOL oh hell no! Why would anyone use this if a perpetual subscription is required to maintain the rights? Absurd.

What is the current SOTA for open source or open weights music generation model?

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.

v5 is really good. I can't believe how much progress Suno has made in such a short time.

As someone who's both a software engineer and music producer its been really interesting to watch the parallel progression of the AI advancements in both areas, as well as my own sentiments towards those advancements.

I've always been pretty bullish about using LLMs to help with coding. My comment history here should verify that. I just thought it was insanley cool tech, and I found I was rediscovering the joy of programming when I could delegate out all the tedious crap I could never get myself to do. Side projects that had languished for years were finally getting somewhere near "done". I also found in many cases it was actually smarter than me, finding cleaner and more elegant solutions to problems than I ever would have. And that was great!

The first time I played with Suno though, it was all so different. I felt deflated. What was the point in making music if a robot could do it better? Yes, the first models were crap, but the writing was on the wall. Music is all about pattern recognition and repetition after all, why wouldn't the robots be great at it? I suddenly knew how all those visual artists felt once the image models started rapidly improving.

So it's been interesting try to disect why I thought coding models were great, and creative models... well, depressing.

Part of it in my case was because being that guy who made cool music was always part of my identity, a part of me I was proud of. Coding, not so much. Don't get me wrong, I've had some pretty big career achievements that I'm very proud of, and I love coding. But at the end of day, the lines of code written were just a means to an end to making something cool.

Which brings me to the other reason I think I was so much more positive about LLMs: the application I was bringing to life with the help of an LLM still very much felt like "mine". Yes, maybe the tedium of writing a bunch of boilerplate was being delegated, but the idea, the architecture, the UX, were still all mine. So I was building something I could still feel proud of.

But typing a prompt into a box and getting a song back? Nah, that's not really mine. It's no different than shouting an idea to a musical improv musician and getting a song back. Maybe you gave them a cool idea, but the song isn't yours.

Which brings me full circle back to this new Suno DAW announcement: this is absolutely incredible. I've only skimmed the announcement so far, but I feel like this brings AI song generation firmly back into the court of how I'm using LLMs to code: letting AI take care of the boring shit, and letting me focus on the composition.

I've only really ever produced electronic music of various varieties, and I have so many uncompleted songs whithering on the vine because I wasted a week of time flipping endlessly through patches, tweaking them, trying to find "that sound" in my head that I could never bring to life, then eventually getting sick of the song and saying fuck it.

And in my experiments with Suno, I found it was actually crazy good at matching a "sound" I described, I just wished I had a way to compose my own song based on the sounds it generated. And now here it is.

Degenerative art in full swing.