I'm familiar with video and image diffusion model architectures, but know almost nothing about music models.
Are there any good papers or writeups on them?
Are there any open source implementations to play with?
Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
31–40 of 165 posts
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#32What is the point of generating this low quality AI slop music, what real use case do you have in mind?
I made little gift songs for friends for awhile. It was nice and fun. Making a roadtrip theme song for friends on a vacation is way fun, and kinda locks in the moment I also used it when I was living in New Orleans to help a friend come up with a riff for a live set he had, which had some unusual constraints (only had a singer, drummer and trombone, but no others, in an echoey space). He used the generated song hook…
There's so much real independent music out there that actually has meaning. I hope you didn't tell your friend you wrote the song, because if someone tricked me into listening to generated not-art and I found out afterwards, I would consider them a liar.
What your friend did, using generation for inspiration for real music he creates is fine. But if someone gifted me an AI generated song I would ask why they didn't pay a few dollars -- honestly not much more -- to a real artist to do the same.
Ten years ago a friend of mine did that, hired a real person, and it cost less than $20 to write a ditty. That's comparable to the cost in tokens for an AI except you could support a real human artist instead of megalomaniac Yarvinists Sam Altman and friends.
And the song would have real meaning. You gave your friend a non-gift. The Let Me Google That For You of gifts. Honestly if one of my friends did that I'd wonder if they even like me.
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#33[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#34I'm familiar with video and image diffusion model architectures, but know almost nothing about music models. Are there any good papers or writeups on them? Are there any open source implementations to play with?
There are!
Audio models are actually quite similar to image models, but there are a few key differences. First, is the autoencoder needs to be designed much more carefully as human hearing is insanely good and music requires orders of magnitude more spatial compression (image AEs do 8X8 downsampling, audio AEs need to do thousands of times downsampling). Second the model itself needs to be really good at placing lyrics/beats (similar to placing text in image diffusion): a sixth finger in an image model is fine, but a missed beat can ruin a song. That's why language model approaches (which have a stronger sequential inductive bias than diffusion models which is good for rhythm and lyric placement) have been really popular in audio.
If you're interested in papers (IMO not good for new people as they make everything seem more complicated than it is):
Stable Audio (similar to our architecture): https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04825 (code: https://github.com/Stability-AI/stable-audio-tools)
MusicGen (Suno-style architecture): https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05284 (code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/audiocraft/tree/main)
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#35So if I make a song using this API, who owns the copyright? Is it me or Sonauto?
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#36Okay. I know these guys IRL. BUT, I genuinely think they have the best music model out there. Hands down. The songs are just more unique, and have a wider range of musical variation. With Suno/Udio, the songs just sounds the same after a while (just with different lyrics).
That could just be me though. I am curious what users of Udio/Suno think?
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#37The transition btw two songs demo is super cool! I often need to do this when editing videos but used to have no way to do it.
Not to mention that now you can have playlists that transition seamlessly btw two songs. Low-cost party DJ?
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#38how is this better or different from suno besides api? I'm assuming since you are smaller the quality is not as good and the depth not as wide.
I use both. Sonauto sounds more "real" and varied than what I can get with suno
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#39So if I make a song using this API, who owns the copyright? Is it me or Sonauto?
From their terms (https://sonauto.ai/tos):
8. OUTPUT As between You and the Services, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, You own any right, title, or interest that may exist in the musical and/or audio content that You generate using the Services ("Outputs"). We hereby assign to You all our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Your Outputs. This assignment does not extend to other users' Outputs, regardless of similarity between Your Outputs and their Outputs. You grant to us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide license to use Your Output to provide, maintain, develop, and improve the Services, to comply with applicable law, and/or to enforce our terms and policies. You are solely responsible for Outputs and Your use of Outputs, including ensuring that Outputs and Your use thereof do not violate any applicable law or these terms of service. We make no warranties or representations regarding the Outputs, including as to their copyrightability or legality. By using the Services, You warrant that You will use Outputs only for legal purposes.
You own the rights, but Sonauto is granted the rights to use it as well.
Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers
#40how did you create this without committing grand theft musica
These high-quality music models require pirating many, many terabytes of music. Torrents are the main way to do it, but they likely scraped sites like Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube.
AI music is a weird business model. They hope that there's enough money peddling music slop after paying off the labels (and maybe eventually the independent music platforms) whose music you stole. Meanwhile, not even Spotify can figure out how to be reliably profitable, serving music people want to hear.