Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator

Hey HN,

My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: https://sonauto.ai/

Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec (https://github.com/descriptinc/descript-audio-codec) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal variational autoencoder bottleneck (along with some other important changes to enable insane compression ratios). This gave us a nice, normally distributed latent space on which to train a diffusion transformer (like Sora). Our diffusion model is also particularly interesting because it is the first audio diffusion model to generate coherent lyrics!

We like diffusion models for music generation because they have some interesting properties that make controlling them easier (so you can make your own music instead of just taking what the machine gives you). For example, we have a rhythm control mode where you can upload your own percussion line or set a BPM. Very soon you'll also be able to generate proper variations of an uploaded or previously generated song (e.g., you could even sing into Voice Memos for a minute and upload that!). @Musicians of HN, try uploading your songs and using Rhythm Control/let us know what you think! Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you.

For example, we turned this drum line (https://sonauto.ai/songs/uoTKycBghUBv7wA2YfNz) into this full song (https://sonauto.ai/songs/KSK7WM1PJuz1euhq6lS7 skip to 1:05 if impatient) or this other song I like better (https://sonauto.ai/songs/qkn3KYv0ICT9kjWTmins - we accidentally compressed it with AAC instead of Opus which hurt quality, though)

We also like diffusion models because while they're expensive to train, they're cheap to serve. We built our own efficient inference infrastructure instead of using those expensive inference as a service startups that are all the rage. That's why we're making generations on our site free and unlimited for as long as possible.

We'd love to answer your questions. Let us know what you think of our first model! https://sonauto.ai/

Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator
sonauto.ai

I was just trying similar apps last week and I was so frustrated with the amount of options and menus to get through before I could generate anything. Not to mention the fact that half of these services ended up asking me to pay per setting. I have to say this was the least painful service to use this far. Pretty impressive output for so little input.

What quality are you producing here ?

Suno has this issue too, but everything sounds like it's washed out or something. As if you recorded it from a different room.

Still I love this, ultimately I think it'll be a tool musicians use vs something for creating stand alone art

This space is going to get very full, very fast. Udio just launched and improves upon "SOTA" Suno. This will just keep coming.

Focus on product. Give actual music producers something they'll find useful. These fad, meme products will compete on edge model capability for 99% of users and ignore serving actual music producers.

I'd like a product with more control, and it doesn't appear Suno or Udio are interested in this.

LessWrong used suno.ai , but the typical song quality is not there yet, so they had to generate 3,000-4,000 songs to get 15 good ones