CheckMag | Five AI music generators that are actually good

We live in a world with an AI generator for almost everything. From stories to pictures and videos, you can generate nearly anything you want with a few simple text prompts.

It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone but there are AI generators for music, too. No, they aren't going to make you the next Grammy award-winning artist, but they are fun to mess around with nonetheless. Here are five options that everyone should check out.

Beatoven.ai

Beatoven generates royalty-free music and is aimed at podcast creators and streamers. It offers a limited free plan that allows one to quickly test their ideas, but you will have to pay up to download your creations.

The subscription plans will cost you $6 per month for 15 minutes of downloadable content, $10 per month for 30 minutes and $20 for 60 minutes. You can also get more minutes by paying $3 for a minute.

The interface is simple and clean. The text prompt box is at the top with a list of prompt examples and tips. As for the tunes created with Beatoven, they sound surprisingly good but can be a bit generic. It had no problems with the various genres I threw at it. However, there were some odd audio overlapping issues when combining two genres. Thankfully, each prompt gives your 4 results to choose from, and I would usually find myself satisfied with one of them. It's a decent generator and can be a godsend for video creators and streamers.

MusicGen

Created by Meta as part of its Audiocraft project, MusicGen is a free music generator hosted on Hugging Face, a platform for AI and ML code. It can create high-quality tunes from simple text prompts - if you manage to get it to work, that is. It always seems to be in a perpetual state of "Something went wrong. This application is too busy. Keep trying!", possible due to how many queries it gets. I only succeeded in getting it to work once but if you have some patience and willingness to wait, this isn't a bad generator. It even lets you upload example audio files to mimic the style.

Loudly

Loudly is a versatile and highly customizable music generator that gives you tons of freedom and control over what you generate. The interface could do with some simplification, but it's easy enough to use. You can create tracks using a pre-defined list of variables or text prompts. It supports uploading audio files as examples, but the feature is currently in beta.

It offers a limited free plan that allows one to create 25 tunes a month with a maximum duration of 30 seconds. $8 per month nets you 900 songs up to 3.5 minutes long, and $24 per month raises that limit to 3000 tunes and 7 minutes, respectively.

Suno.ai

Suno.ai can create lush tunes with vocals and lyrics or a grand orchestral score for a fantasy film. It can create songs using text prompts or audio examples. My favourite feature is the Explore tab, which functions as a randomized roulette wheel where you can make music by choosing a style or using the dice to pick one at random.

All of this does come at a price, with the free plan only giving you 50 credits daily or about 10 tunes. $10 per month will get you 2500 credits (500 tunes), and $30 will net you 10,000 credits (2000 tunes).

Soundraw

Soundraw does not use text prompts to generate music, unlike many of its competitors. It lets you choose the length and tempo of a tune that's about to be generated; then, you pick an option in the list of genres and let it do its thing.

Once a song gets created, you can refine it using a very detailed studio interface that lets you control "mood" for each section, change the length or tempo, use different instruments, and try out various key changes.

The free plan does not impose a limit on how many tracks one can generate; instead, it removes the option of downloading the tunes generated. The plans on offer are separated into two tiers, which are "content creators" and "music professionals". The creator plan will cost you $12.99 per month and give you access to unlimited downloads but without transferring the right to songs to you.

The music professionals tier has three plans starting from $25.99 and with these, you own the songs completely.