I've spent the past three weeks making music on both of these sites and was alerted to Suno by a news YouTuber, Actual Justice Warrior. And I was alerted to Udio by a tech YouTuber, Cold Fusion. Both sites allow you to type in prompts to create AI generated music in 30 to 60 second clips, allowing you to piece together a song that sounds real and human-like, most of the time. Here are the pros and cons.
Pros
- The quality of the songs vary, but about 70-80% of the time, what you'll get generated will sound pretty good and realistic, as if actual human beings created or made the song.
- The AI vocals and music are really good with high quality sound.
- The AI is advanced and complex in understanding music, even adding things like vocal runs, vocal improvisations ("ad libs"), vocal embellishments, melismas, and ornamentations in vocals. In other words, it legitimately sounds like real music from real singers.
- The prompt box and UI has some good details in Custom Mode, allowing you to easily add lyrics, title your song, and describe its music genre and mood.
- Songs generated also come with free AI album cover art. This helps better organize the UI and make songs visually stand apart from each other on the menu.
- Quick song generations; usually only takes 30 seconds or less to get two AI generated songs at a time.
- Usually has a better time staying consistent through extensions; but not always.
- Can generate more content in less time; usually two minutes of music in under 30 seconds.
- Because of the above, you can usually get songs fully created much quicker; in about an hour or less, despite requiring piecing together all the samples into a single track once finished.
- Has an Instrumental mode and Custom Lyrics mode.
Cons
- The site has quite a many bugs and glitches, in both the website programming and the AI generation; sometimes songs will be glitched or a garbled mess. And other times, song extensions won't add much of anything, will only be ten seconds longer (you can't control how long a song gets extended), or will just be dead silence. And LOTS of times, the songs' genre or style won't be remotely close to what you entered in the prompt.
- The free model kinda sucks; you only get 50 credits (10 free songs) a day. Considering how often the AI makes mistakes or errors, this is actually pretty bad and doesn't incentivize users to upgrade to a paid subscription.
- Out of those 10 free songs a day, usually only about 5 of them or less will actually be something useful, not taking personal subjective taste into account.
- The AI CANNOT recognize prompts like gender differences in vocals (requesting a female singer for a pop song, and getting male vocals instead) or specific subgenres of music, like indie vs alternative rock, or gangsta hip hop vs trap. These are among the errors in song generations previously mentioned.
- Downvoting song generations removes it from your view, almost as if deleting it. Not sure if this is intentional to hide it from your "good" songs, or if this is a bug.
- Downvoting songs is almost useless. Usually, this is meant to give the AI feedback and train it on what you prefer and what you don't want. But here, it doesn't seem to have any purpose other than pseudo-erasing songs you downvote, as the AI learns nothing from the feature.
- The prompt box has limited characters, so you'll often not get enough space to give an accurate description. You have to keep your words short and precise. This also may contribute to some songs generated not being what you requested or had in mind.
- You cannot mention any music artists, musician names, or real song names in prompts or lyrics at all, which further hurts the ability to describe the kind of music you want. If you try to use a real artist or song title, the AI will fail to generate anything and threaten you with a ban warning.
- Mediocre site UI. Things need to be much more organized in the menu with more options given to users to keep their UI clean and neat.
- Song extensions needs to be improved, like adding in a Generation Tree on songs to keep everything organized when you do extensions or alterations. They do have a "parts" link on extended songs, but it's only just a label and not really part of the UI in a link tree. (Not into you put them all together in a Whole Song.)
- Extending song durations do not add to the existing song; they only create a "part two" or "part three" separate from the previous parts, meaning you'll eventually have to piece everything together as a "Whole Song" once you're finished. These extensions can also sometimes be drastically different from the previous pieces before it, not having song cohesion and not sounding like the same parts of a single song.
- The AI doesn't do a good job with auto-generated lyrics in Custom Mode when extending a song, especially if the original first part had custom human-written lyrics in them. When extending a song, you'll either have to add in original lyrics you create yourself, or leave it blank and take a chance the AI won't give you complete random garbage that doesn't match what came before it.
- The album cover art generated by AI cannot be changed, removed, or replaced with your own images at this time.
- The Playlist section sucks, and doesn't even allow you to add songs from the Playlist page; you have to go to the Library to add songs there.
- There's no "Manual Mode" on the site, meaning the AI is fully free to do whatever it wants and improvise things you didn't ask it to, giving you less creative control and freedom.
- There's no "Remix" option allowing you to create variations to generated songs or input new prompts to alter slight things to a song (for example, you may really like one song, but it gave you a female singer instead of a male one. Or the intro is bad.) Effectively, you cannot edit a song in any way, other than extensions.
- There's no feature to upload music to the site to get variations or arrangements to existing tracks, even if they're original pieces you've made yourself.
OVERALL: Suno is great, when it actually works, but it has too many issues to recommend anything beyond the free subscription, even if it really sucks only getting a tiny amount of song generations daily. When you get a good song, it's quite good. But that will only be half the time or less. It's not recommended to pay money for until its prompt AI and other bugs can be fixed. 7/10.
Pros
- Gives you lots of free credits without a paid subscription; 600 a month, allowing you to basically generate 300 original AI songs in 30 days, which averages out to be 10 songs a day. (Honestly, I think giving you a full month's worth of songs is a little too much for a free account as opposed to daily credits, and I don't know how they can make money on such a business plan, but I'm not complaining.)
- Extending the duration of a song extends the whole song, allowing you to keep the original portion, plus the new extended section, in one file. No need to piece together all the parts into one whole song.
- Gives you plenty of auto-tags to suggest to the AI.
- Has a Manual Mode which allows the AI to only make what you tell it to and not take "creative liberties" and improvisations.
- Has a Generation Tree when extending songs, as well as automatic labels to the extended sections, allowing for much better organization to the UI.
- Allows you to mention any music artists, musician names, or real song names in the prompt or lyrics, but will replace them with generic tags and descriptions before the final songs are produced to avoid copyright and legal issues.
- Has a Remix option to create variations of songs it already produced and you can choose how similar or different you want the variations to be (although the slider definitely needs a number or percentage on there instead of having us randomly guess what percentage of change it'll be.)
- Has an Instrumental mode and Custom Lyrics mode.
Cons
- The quality of the songs are far worse than Suno and definitely sounds like soulless, AI-generated music most of the time. The songs are mediocre-but-usable, considering they're free. Maybe 5-10% of the time, you'll get something truly good, but even then, it'll still likely have flat vocals and sound like AI generated music.
- The vocals are the most bland, soulless part of the songs.
- An ugly website with TERRIBLE UI, with a cramped horizontal prompt-box that's way too small to properly type in (on both desktop and mobile) and absolutely HIDEOUS. The UI is probably one of the worst things about the site and it's awful to use when trying to extend a song to full length. Why the prompt section is a small horizontal box where you can barely see anything at all, is baffling, but it's probably to accommodate mobile users.
- No AI album-art; it's just the same neon pink, green, or blue microchip images every time. Doesn't sound like much to complain about, but combined with the ugly website and terrible UI, makes it easy to visually get confused once you've created more than 7 or 8 songs. In other words, everything on the screen looks the same.
- Constant automatic logouts.
- SLOW song generations, usually takes 2 to 3 minutes at a time to get two AI generated songs and you can't multitask or do multiple pairs of songs at once. You just have to wait or open up a new tab and do something else until they're done.
- Takes a long time to generate music samples, and the samples are only 30 seconds or less every time, creating a full song is a very slow process that requires much patience.
- Because of the terrible UI, short duration of samples, lower quality of songs (meaning more bad samples,) and SLOW generation time, it'll take a LOT longer to piece together a good song; usually several hours if you're not lucky.
OVERALL: Udio is great as a free AI song generation site, but the quality of most songs will kinda suck and definitely sound inferior to real music. The generation time is also really slow and the samples are really short in duration too, requiring much longer time to complete a full song. Udio would've been much better in 2021 or 2022, but Suno is a better AI music site overall. Regardless, Udio gives you a lot for free and if you don't mind the lackluster quality, is worth checking out. 6/10.
Comparing both websites, Suno is definitely the better website and gives you far better sounding AI generated music when it actually works, while Udio has the benefit of mostly being free. Suno feels like a modern mid-2020s AI website, while Udio feels like the first generation of this type of thing; something from a few years ago at the very beginning of public AI creation, down there with Dall-E 2. If Suno fixes its various bugs and issues, cleaned up the site's AI problems, and gave you 80 to 100 free credits a day (allowing up to 16 to 20 free daily songs, with about 8 to 10 of them being usable) it'd definitely be the superior AI generation site. But until these issues are fixed, Suno gives you quality over quantity, while Udio gives you quantity over quality.
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