Is Udio a Disruptor for AI Music Creation? Insights from Creators

Udio, a new AI music generation engine just dropped, leaving the AI community in awe of its prowess. It is a LLM based audio generation model that can generate instrumental music as well as incorporate custom lyrics given by the user. Udio can even generate lyrics on its own to fit the mood and description of the song according to the prompts given by the user.

Highlights:

• A new AI generation engine called Udio was released yesterday, to generate 33-second high-fidelity music.
• It is being touted as the new ChatGPT but for music by many creators. Udio allows users to create music using a very wide variety of genres, sounds, and instruments.
• Its beta program permits users to have 1200 audio generations per month.

The Team Behind Udio AI

Udio AI was started by four former employees of Google’s AI research wing, DeepMind — David Ding, Conor Durkan, Charlie Nash, Yaroslav Ganin, and Andrew Sanchez — along with Andrew Sanchez. They’re backed by a range of tech heavyweights, including a16z (a.k.a. Andreesen Horowitz) and Instagram co-founder and CTO Mike Krieger.

Rolling Stone reported the major difference between Udio and the previous “King of the industry” Suno.

They said, unlike Suno, which is focused on putting music-making tools into the hands of average consumers, Udio also sees itself as a tool for musicians, and the founders say its creative abilities along those lines should ease creators’ concerns about their use of training data.

We have been guided by musical people from the outset and what that means is that we’re making a product which is going to enable those folks to create great music and, to be clear, to make money off of that music in the future.

Andrew Sanchez

How does Udio work?

Udio operates on intuitive and powerful text prompting with a wide range of tags from genres to specific lyrics, feelings, and instruments.

There is nothing available that comes close to the ease of use, voice quality, and musicality of what we’ve achieved with Udio — it’s a real testament to the folks we have involved.

David Ding, co-founder and CEO of Udio

The “default” length of the AI creations is 33 seconds, and the duration of the song can be easily extended multiple times.

“It works better the more you put in: writing lyrics, exploring sound and genre combos, and expressing your creative taste through curation,” Udio said.

How to Access Udio?

1) Make an account on Udio through their website and register under the beta program. Each new user gets 1200 generations per month for the beta period of the product. 

2) Udio has a detailed auto lyric generation feature with the ability to customize tags like instruments, sound, and description of the lyrics.

3) Making tracks with Udio is easy. Just type a description of what you’d like to create in the prompt box and click Create. For example, type “a jazz song about New York”.

4) If you’re not sure what to type try clicking on the dice icon to populate the prompt box with a random example prompt. A typical prompt consists of a combination of free-form text and tags.

5) Additionally, a prompt can have a reference to an artist style which makes it easier to describe music you’d like to create.

6) Once a track has been created, users can further edit their creations through the app’s “remix” feature.

The company said it’s a bit rough around the edges but users don’t seem to have noted anything of the sort.

What do Creators and AI Experts say about Udio?

Creators have experimented with multiple different prompts and types of music with varying results. However, the general consensus is that the level of customization, the coherence of music generated, and the lyric quality are all impressive.

Rowan Cheung, the founder of Rundown AI called it the “ChatGPT for music” and Min Choi, an AI educator on X referred to it as the Sora for music generation.

Each user who tried it is full of praise for the product.

Here are a few examples:

1) This user generated background audio using the prompt “unsettling atmospheric electronic music with carnival elements, liminal, darker synth” that could be used as a score in horror/thriller movies.

2) A creator on the Udio site created a musical theatre interpretation of the movie Dune and it is a loud and jolly tune perfectly suited to musical theatre but greatly in contrast with the grim tone of the movie. The lyrics are humorous and perfect!

3) Elements of electronic & progressive house vibes was the prompt given by this creator and this was the result!

Conclusion

With the arrival of Udio, many are calling the development groundbreaking and so it is. The quality of content being generated by it improves after each iteration as the model learns and realigns based on the user inputs. We can only wait and watch to see the impressive things Udio AI can do next.