i actually was discussing that with a guy i met the other day, an old school producer, did succesful stuff 30 years ago. He used SUNO to reinterpret old and ideas of his, in his judgement it did an excellent job and lets him create many songs daily if he want.
Sounds familliar? the good old "let AI be steered by experienced X and boost productivity".
All in all, gun to the head, i think i am so critical because to use these tools is surrendering to big corpos. It is not a democratic tool. If it was i would probably be using it. I have finally given up and started messing with local models (well, i did already with images) but general local models are useless.
OR maybe it's me? i cannot for one moment let go and converse with the machine. I can give order to the machine.
The tech is fantastic, but the fact that it's in the hand of corpos with all interests in never letting us be able to do shit without them, makes me one hundred and one percent against it.
I think this is a huge part of the reason people sometimes find AI criticism so dismissible; there is always some factor other than the actual product it seems that AI-made assets are judged on. With Suno, the biggest ones I've seen are 1) hating AI-created music by virtue of it being AI-created, and 2) the hate is from people who attempt to generate income from their music production, and Suno made music cuts into that pie.
The problem is that it's doing it by diffusion techniques, so all its high percussion is totally vague and indistinct. Hell, it can't even do a decent psy kick because that too is unspecific and you can't have a psy track that is vague and blunted.
Turns out you can have a production that is hollow, weak and devoid of what makes purely synth machine tracks. It can't get trancey in a serious way because it's not capable of being sharp enough.
Got an example of the genre done properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va1KBtI81TY or alternately you could just look up some Infected Mushroom early tracks :)
By giving up that control, you do get to a quality end result sooner, but that end result can only be an approximation to your original vision, since you're giving up the control required to shape the sound to that granular level.
It's like any LLM, it's not a tool for if you know exactly what you want with all these knobs and fine grained controls.
> The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different genres together, and it made something unsettling in a way I don't remember hearing before.
I don't think that's a bug or unexpected, it's what AI is good for. I do these (very) old Blues covers of modern songs and it's terrific at that sort of conversion thing.