Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator

There's always going to be a balance between creating high level tools like this with no dials and low level tools with finer control, and while this touts itself as being "more controllable", it's clearly not there. But, the same way Adobe has integrated outpainting and generative fill into Photoshop, it's only a matter of time before products like this are built into Ableton and VSTs - where a creator can highlight a bar or two and ask your AI to make the the snippet more ethereal, create a bridge between the verse and the sax solo, or help you with an outro.

That said, similar to generating basic copy for a marketing site, these tools will be great for generating cheap background music but not much else, but any musician, marketing agency, or film-maker worth their salt is going to need very specifically branded music for their needs, and they're likely willing to pay for a real licence to something audiences will recognize, using generative AI and tools to remix the content to their specific need.

I think the other missing pieces I've found are upscaling and stem splitting. While existing tool exist for splitting stems exist, my testing found that this didn't work well in practice (at least on Suno music), likely due to a combination of encoder-specific artifacts and the overall low sound quality. Existing upscaling approaches also faced similar issues.

My naive guess is that these are things that will benefit from being closely intertwined with the generation process. Eg when splitting up stems, you can use the diffusion model(s) to help jointly converge individual stems into reasonable standalone tracks.

I'm excited about the potential of these tools. I've definitely personally found uses cases for small independent game projects where a paying for musicians is far out of budget, and the style of music is not one I can execute on my own. But I'm not willing to sacrifice on quality of results to do so.

Thanks for the feedback re: DAWs, though! That would be really cool. Maybe we can tag tracks based on the effects applied to them to allow this to be more controllable.