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.