[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sonauto API - Generative music for developers
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Sonauto API - Generative music for developers
Hello again HN, Since our launch ten months ago, my cofounder and
I have continued to improve our music model significantly. You can
listen to some cool Staff Picks songs from the latest version here
https://sonauto.ai/ , listen to an acapella song I made for my
housemate here
https://sonauto.ai/song/8a20210c-563e-491b-bb11-f8c6db92ee9b , or
try the free and unlimited generations yourself. However, given
there are only two of us right now competing in the "best model and
average user UI" race we haven't had the time to build some of the
really neat ideas our users and pro musicians have been dreaming up
(e..g, DAW plugins, live performance transition generators, etc).
The hacker musician community has a rich history of taking new tech
and doing really cool and unexpected stuff with it, too. As such,
we're opening up an API that gives full access to the features of
our underlying diffusion model (e.g., generation, inpainting,
extensions, transition generation, inverse sampling). Here are some
things our early test users are already doing with it: - A cool
singing-to-video model by our friends at Lemon Slice:
https://x.com/LemonSliceAI/status/1894084856889430147 (try it
yourself here https://lemonslice.com/studio) - Open source wrapper
written by one of our musician users:
https://github.com/OlaFosheimGrostad/networkmusic - You can also
play with all the API features via our consumer UI here:
https://sonauto.ai/create We also have some examples written in
Python here: https://github.com/Sonauto/sonauto-api-examples -
Generate a rock song: https://github.com/Sonauto/sonauto-api-
examples/blob/main/ro... - Download two songs from YouTube (e.g.,
Smash Mouth to Rick Astley) and generate a transition between them:
https://github.com/Sonauto/sonauto-api-examples/blob/main/tr... -
Generate a singing telegram video (powered by ours and also Lemon
Slice's API): https://github.com/Sonauto/sonauto-api-
examples/blob/main/si... You can check out the full docs/get your
key here: https://sonauto.ai/developers We'd love to hear what you
think, and are open to answering any tech questions about our model
too! It's still a latent diffusion model, but much larger and with
a much better GAN decoder.
Author : zaptrem
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-03-03 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sonauto.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (sonauto.ai)
| zaptrem wrote:
| One thing I've been thinking about is how to do a better hobbyist
| plan system. It would be cool to do a flat rate unlimited plan,
| but we wouldn't want that to then be abused by larger
| customers/companies. Are there existing API providers you think
| solve this particularly well?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Why would a hobbyist need an unlimited plan?
| zaptrem wrote:
| E.g., in the case of a future "LibreMusic" open source UI or
| an integration into their DAW they work with on the weekends.
| I'd get pretty annoyed if I had to keep putting a coin in the
| machine to adjust Logic Pro effects.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I don't think it meets your ask of "solve this particularly
| well" but the unlimited plans in video that I am familiar with
| have a fast/slow queue system. This effectively limits the
| plan. It seems, as well, that these kind of queue systems are
| tiered. So you can have N number of fast queued items, X number
| of tier one slow queue, Y number of tier two slow queue, etc.
| On the backend this is probably just some kind of weighted
| priority queue where the number of requests in some time
| duration determines some weight scaling factor.
| zaptrem wrote:
| I think this is a good start, X high speed queries per hour
| then unlimited low-priority ones after. Do you know of any
| specific companies that do this we could take a look at?
| zoogeny wrote:
| runway.ai (video gen) is what I was thinking when I
| suggested this.
| naltroc wrote:
| how did you create this without committing grand theft musica
| zaptrem wrote:
| In my opinion training on all music is no more theft than
| Taylor Swift listening to the radio growing up (as long as we
| don't regurgitate existing songs which would be bad and useless
| anyway). I think an alternative legal interpretation where all
| of humanity's musical knowledge and history are controlled by
| three megacorporations (UMG/Sony/Warner) would be kinda
| depressing. If the above is true we might as well shutdown
| OpenAI and delete all LLM weights while we're at it, losing
| massive value to humanity.
| wryoak wrote:
| I'm skeptical about how much value AI art is going to really
| contribute to humanity but as a lifelong opponent of
| copyright I have to roll my eyes when I see people arguing
| against it on behalf of _real artists_ , all of whom are
| thieves in the best case and imitators in the worst.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yeah every musician has a story of writing a new song,
| bringing it to the band, and they say "oh, this sounds just
| like [song]." It's almost impossible to make something
| truly novel.
| dleeftink wrote:
| > almost impossible to make something truly novel
|
| But beyond the originality !== novelty discussion, I'm
| not sure how we've come to equate 'creativity' (and the
| rights to retaining it) to a sort of fingerprint encoding
| one's work. As if a band, artist or creator should stick
| to a certain brand once invented, and we can sufficiently
| capture that brand in dense legalese or increasingly,
| stylistic prompts.
|
| How many of today's artists just 'riffing' off existing
| motifs will remain, if the end result of their creative
| endeavours will be absorbed into generative tools in some
| manner? What's the incentive for indies to distribute
| digitally, beyond the guarantee their works will provide
| the (auditory) fingerprints for the next content
| generation system?
| Xelynega wrote:
| Megacorporations owning copyrights to the majority of
| IPs(music, games, etc.) is a capitalism/monopoly problem. How
| does getting rid of copyright and allowing your company to
| profit off other peoples work in any way solve that issue?
| gazebo64 wrote:
| The difference being that a musician being influenced by
| other musicians still has to work to develop the skills
| necessary to distill those influences into a final product,
| and colors that output with their own subjective experiences
| and taste. This feels like a conveniently naive
| interpretation to justify stealing artists' work and using it
| to create derivative generative slop. The final line in your
| comment is pretty telling of how seriously you take this
| issue (which is near-universally decried by artists) -- some
| other massive company is doing a bad thing, so why shouldn't
| I?
|
| edit: I have to add how disingenuous I find calling out
| corporations owning "all of humanity's musical knowledge and
| history" as if generative AI music trained on unlicensed work
| from artists is somehow a moral good. At least the contracts
| artists make with these corporations are consensual and have
| the potential to yield the artist some benefit which is more
| than you can say for these gen-AI music apps.
| zaptrem wrote:
| I don't see how the amount of work that went into it
| changes the core fact that all art is influenced by that
| which came before, and we don't call that stealing (unless
| you truly believe that "all art is theft").
|
| My point re: LLMs wasn't meant to exclusively be a "they're
| doing it" one, the hope was to give an example of something
| many people would agree is super useful and valuable (I
| work much faster and learned so much more in college thanks
| to LLMs) that would be impossible in the proposed strict
| interpretation of copyright.
|
| edit responding to your edit:
|
| Re: moral good: I think that bringing the sum of human
| musical knowledge to anybody who cares to try for free is a
| moral good. Music production software costs >$200 and
| studios cost thousands and majoring in music costs hundreds
| of thousands, but we can make getting started so much
| easier.
|
| Is it really consent for those artists signing to labels
| when only three companies have total control of all music
| consumption and production for the mass market? To be
| clear, artists absolutely have a right to benefit from
| reproduction of their recordings. I just don't think anyone
| should have rights to the knowledge built into those
| creations since in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin
| with (if their right to this knowledge were affirmed, every
| new song someone creates could hypothetically have a konga
| line of lawyer teams clamoring for "their cut" of that
| chord progression/instrument sample/effect/lyrical
| theme/style).
| gazebo64 wrote:
| I think we intuitively allow for artists to derive and
| interpolate from their influences because of a baseline
| understanding that A) it is impossible to create art
| without influence and B) that there is an inherent value
| in a human creating art and expressing themselves. How
| that relates to someone using unlicensed music from
| actual humans to train an AI model in order to profit off
| of the collective work of thousands of actual human
| artists, I have no idea.
|
| edit:
|
| > I think that bringing the sum of human musical
| knowledge to anybody who cares to try for free is a moral
| good
|
| Generative AI music isn't in any way accomplishing this
| goal. A free Spotify account with ads accomplishes this
| goal -- being able to generate a passable tune using a
| mish-mash of existing human works isn't bringing musical
| knowledge to the masses, it's just enabling end users to
| entertain themselves and you to profit from that.
|
| > Is it really consent for those artists signing to
| labels
|
| Yes? Ignoring the fact that there are independent labels
| outside the ownership of the Big Three you mention,
| artists enter into contracts with labels consensually
| because of the benefits the label can offer them. You
| train your model on these artists' output without their
| consent, credit or notification, profit off of it and
| offer nothing in return to the artists.
| zaptrem wrote:
| A) Agreed! B) So I guess the argument here is that this
| doesn't apply to AI music. I think that if someone really
| pours their soul into the lyrics of a song and
| regenerates/experiments with prompts until it's just
| right, and maybe even contributes a melody or starting
| point that's still a human creating art and expressing
| themselves. It's definitely not as difficult as creating
| a song from scratch, but I've been told similar arguments
| were made regarding whether photography was art when that
| became a thing.
|
| btw, if the user of the AI doesn't do any of the above
| then I think the US copyright office says it can't be
| copyrighted in the first place (so no profiting for them
| anyway).
| gazebo64 wrote:
| > if the user of the AI doesn't do any of the above then
| I think the US copyright office says it can't be
| copyrighted in the first place (so no profiting for them
| anyway).
|
| Am I understanding right that the point here is that
| while you are able to get away with using copyrighted
| material to turn a profit, your end users cannot, so no
| worries?
| haswell wrote:
| I think there are a few fallacies at play here:
|
| 1. Anthropomorphizing the kind of "influence" and
| "learning" these tools are doing, which is quite
| unrelated to the human process
|
| 2. Underrepresenting the massive differences in scale
| when comparing the human process of learning vs. the
| massive data centers training the AI models
|
| 3. Ignoring that this isn't just about influence, it's
| about the fact that the models would not exist at all, if
| not for the work of the artists it was trained on
| braebo wrote:
| It's intellectual property laundering. A company selling a
| button that launders the blood sweat and tears of generations
| of artists is not the same as a person being inspired and
| dedicating themselves to mastery.
|
| Humans create value. AI consumes and commoditizes that value,
| stealing it from the people and selling it back to their
| customers.
|
| It's unethical and will be detrimental in the long run. All
| profit should be distributed to all artists in the training
| set.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| no one can actually explain the value OpenAI adds to
| humanity. What massive loss? What have we gained from this
| entity other than another billionaire riding a hype cycle?
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| The first 80s song I heard was a literal copy of Phil Collins.
| But there are no emotions attached to it (for me), and the
| lyrics are random. It's more like supermarket background music
| IMHO, not something I would pay for, especially when we have
| centuries of music to discover already, why make fake stuff
| like that?
|
| Edit: I have just heard the funniest most ridiculous metal song
| ever without a touch of metal inside. Breathe of Death, it's
| like a bad joke.
|
| If thats the future of anything, I'm going back to plain C
| (code) when I retire and I'll never approach the internet ever
| again.
| lexandstuff wrote:
| These high-quality music models require pirating many, many
| terabytes of music. Torrents are the main way to do it, but
| they likely scraped sites like Bandcamp, Soundcloud and
| YouTube.
|
| AI music is a weird business model. They hope that there's
| enough money peddling music slop after paying off the labels
| (and maybe eventually the independent music platforms) whose
| music you stole. Meanwhile, not even Spotify can figure out how
| to be reliably profitable, serving music people want to hear.
| toisanji wrote:
| how is this better or different from suno besides api? I'm
| assuming since you are smaller the quality is not as good and the
| depth not as wide.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Suno's RVQ-token-based language model is tuned give you an
| acceptable song that most of their userbase would prefer every
| single time, but isn't very diverse. Our diffusion model is
| much more diverse and has higher vocal audio quality, but the
| results aren't always consistent (just like Flux et al).
| However, since we have unlimited generations this can be worked
| around. We're also never going to preference tune our model
| because I think the stuff that is lost in that process is
| valuable.
| lcolucci wrote:
| I use both. Sonauto sounds more "real" and varied than what I
| can get with suno
| tombot wrote:
| What is the point of generating this low quality AI slop music,
| what real use case do you have in mind?
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| Some kind of Dadaist movement I guess. Listen to Breathe of
| Death, it's hilarious and then you cry.
| zaptrem wrote:
| For the consumer stuff: It's fun, and IMO that's enough. Not
| every song has to be peak artistic quality pushing the world
| forward, sometimes it's enough to bring a smile to a friend's
| face by making a song about them. If you think their art is
| slop you shouldn't have to listen to it (IMO Spotify et al
| should have an optional "no AI music" filter for now).
|
| For the API: I think this could be integrated into artists
| workflows in lots of ways we can't even imagine right now as it
| gets better. One example I gave above was generating
| transitions between songs.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| the reason a song from a friend makes you happy is directly
| related to the effort behind it, this is totally meaningless.
| zaptrem wrote:
| The reason anything makes anyone happy is completely
| subjective, as evidenced by the many people who have told
| us our app made them and/or their friends and family happy.
| patcon wrote:
| I made little gift songs for friends for awhile. It was nice
| and fun. Making a roadtrip theme song for friends on a vacation
| is way fun, and kinda locks in the moment
|
| I also used it when I was living in New Orleans to help a
| friend come up with a riff for a live set he had, which had
| some unusual constraints (only had a singer, drummer and
| trombone, but no others, in an echoey space). He used the
| generated song hook as inspiration for that nights' arrangement
|
| There's lots of stuff, and song of it supports artists who have
| tight timelines and want creative support
| dingnuts wrote:
| There's so much real independent music out there that
| actually has meaning. I hope you didn't tell your friend you
| wrote the song, because if someone tricked me into listening
| to generated not-art and I found out afterwards, I would
| consider them a liar.
|
| What your friend did, using generation for inspiration for
| real music he creates is fine. But if someone gifted me an AI
| generated song I would ask why they didn't pay a few dollars
| -- honestly not much more -- to a real artist to do the same.
|
| Ten years ago a friend of mine did that, hired a real person,
| and it cost less than $20 to write a ditty. That's comparable
| to the cost in tokens for an AI except you could support a
| real human artist instead of megalomaniac Yarvinists Sam
| Altman and friends.
|
| And the song would have real meaning. You gave your friend a
| non-gift. The Let Me Google That For You of gifts. Honestly
| if one of my friends did that I'd wonder if they even like
| me.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| The problem with AI music, and in fact AI in general, is
| that weve spent the last few decades aggressively attacking
| the idea that art should get paid for at all and yet people
| still do it, because they love it. So musicians work for
| pennies, and yet people still need to replace them with a
| machine.
|
| So even if you just pay someone else to make you a song,
| its not really any more expensive than this. Same with
| painting. What does this AI bring to the table, at all? It
| grosses me out.
|
| People on this site should go pick up a guitar and write a
| 3 chord song about someone, itll take you a day if that.
| Its not hard! Its fun!
| zoogeny wrote:
| Not related to this post, but I was wondering about AI music
| generators and I don't have experience with their capabilities.
| The ones I know seem catered to making entire songs.
|
| I was having a discussion with a friend who writes a lot of
| guitar music but can also play bass and sing. However, getting
| good drums is a problem. What he'd like is a service to upload
| his songs in some form (just guitar, or a mixed version with bass
| and vocals) and get an output that layers a drum track without
| altering the input. Ideally with appropriate fills, etc. I mean,
| just getting an in-time drum stem would probably be even better.
|
| Is there any GenAI service to do this kind of incremental
| additive drums?
| vunderba wrote:
| Not sure about GenAI, but Logic Pro has the ability to add a
| Session Drummer which can be set to track a given bass stem and
| produce passable drums for a song.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| There's work in that area, it's sometimes called "accompaniment
| generation."
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12662
|
| https://fastsag.github.io/
| echelon wrote:
| I'm familiar with video and image diffusion model architectures,
| but know almost nothing about music models.
|
| Are there any good papers or writeups on them?
|
| Are there any open source implementations to play with?
| zaptrem wrote:
| There are!
|
| Audio models are actually quite similar to image models, but
| there are a few key differences. First, is the autoencoder
| needs to be designed much more carefully as human hearing is
| insanely good and music requires orders of magnitude more
| spatial compression (image AEs do 8X8 downsampling, audio AEs
| need to do thousands of times downsampling). Second the model
| itself needs to be _really_ good at placing lyrics /beats
| (similar to placing text in image diffusion): a sixth finger in
| an image model is fine, but a missed beat can ruin a song.
| That's why language model approaches (which have a stronger
| sequential inductive bias than diffusion models which is good
| for rhythm and lyric placement) have been really popular in
| audio.
|
| If you're interested in papers (IMO not good for new people as
| they make everything seem more complicated than it is):
|
| Stable Audio (similar to our architecture):
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04825 (code:
| https://github.com/Stability-AI/stable-audio-tools)
|
| MusicGen (Suno-style architecture):
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05284 (code:
| https://github.com/facebookresearch/audiocraft/tree/main)
| dingnuts wrote:
| This project competes with small-time musicians to create
| meaningless dreck at a cost that is probably comparable to hiring
| session musicians who already work for pennies.
|
| Honestly I think anyone who contributes to or uses a service like
| this one does a massive disservice to real artists, and it's our
| duty to boycott services like this, and to not operate them.
|
| Please delete this project, as you are actively making the world
| worse. Thanks.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| i agree more times over than I can count. Its pointless,
| borderline offensive, will not enrich anyone, and makes us all
| worse off.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Over the years I've seen people get a lot of hate for things
| they've poured their souls into who turn around and post
| snarky/insulting responses that ended up getting them into even
| more hot water. I always wondered why they didn't respond with
| their clearly well thought out reasoning behind what they built
| instead of the snark, even if the original comment wasn't in
| good faith either. I understand them a little better now.
|
| It's def valid to ask about the value of projects like this,
| but I think "Please delete this project, as you are actively
| making the world worse." isn't the right way to start that
| discussion if that was your intent. I also detailed my thoughts
| about the whole industry a little further down so I'll avoid
| duplicating that.
| weberer wrote:
| So if I make a song using this API, who owns the copyright? Is it
| me or Sonauto?
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| From their terms (https://sonauto.ai/tos):
|
| 8. OUTPUT As between You and the Services, and to the extent
| permitted by applicable law, You own any right, title, or
| interest that may exist in the musical and/or audio content
| that You generate using the Services ("Outputs"). We hereby
| assign to You all our right, title, and interest, if any, in
| and to Your Outputs. This assignment does not extend to other
| users' Outputs, regardless of similarity between Your Outputs
| and their Outputs. You grant to us an unrestricted, unlimited,
| irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-
| free, fully-paid, worldwide license to use Your Output to
| provide, maintain, develop, and improve the Services, to comply
| with applicable law, and/or to enforce our terms and policies.
| You are solely responsible for Outputs and Your use of Outputs,
| including ensuring that Outputs and Your use thereof do not
| violate any applicable law or these terms of service. We make
| no warranties or representations regarding the Outputs,
| including as to their copyrightability or legality. By using
| the Services, You warrant that You will use Outputs only for
| legal purposes.
|
| You own the rights, but Sonauto is granted the rights to use it
| as well.
| zaptrem wrote:
| I'm not sure to what extent AI music is copyrightable (I think
| it depends on a case-by-case amount of human influence) but our
| TOS assigns any rights we may have to the user.
| sid-the-kid wrote:
| Okay. I know these guys IRL. BUT, I genuinely think they have the
| best music model out there. Hands down. The songs are just more
| unique, and have a wider range of musical variation. With
| Suno/Udio, the songs just sounds the same after a while (just
| with different lyrics).
|
| That could just be me though. I am curious what users of
| Udio/Suno think?
| lcolucci wrote:
| The transition btw two songs demo is super cool! I often need to
| do this when editing videos but used to have no way to do it.
|
| Not to mention that now you can have playlists that transition
| seamlessly btw two songs. Low-cost party DJ?
| jdee wrote:
| Signed up with gmail, and get 'Generation Failed' with every
| attempt. Please dont email me or add me to your marketing list.
| zaptrem wrote:
| There was a single unhealthy worker that didn't get caught, we
| just killed it.
| covi wrote:
| Congrats on the API launch (from SkyPilot)!
| zaptrem wrote:
| Thanks! We used SkyPilot (an open source cloud GPU worker
| management tool) to help out with both our small (single node)
| and large (many node) training runs.
| 658677646 wrote:
| 888888 wllh
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| I'm not going to comment on the technical side of things, which
| is way beyond my technical comprehensions skills, and I'm sure it
| required a considerable amount of brain, time and energy to reach
| similar results.
|
| But music production and distribution is (actually, _was_ ) my
| home turf, so here's my two cents on the topic:
|
| I've already heard music qualitatively on par with the tracks
| available on your demo page. I've heard it way more than I truly
| wanted or felt it was necessary, at least once a day while
| tracking on pro tools hundreds of albums you've never ever heard
| of, in studios in France and LA, for years.
|
| It was made with people with the best intentions, coming from all
| sorts of walks of life, and yet it was obvious from the first
| note they played that they were condemned to the oblivion, their
| music destined to be basically never heard by anyone.
|
| And this has been done every day, multiple times a day, in every
| studio around the world, since the '60s.
|
| 20% of Spotify music has never been played once. IIRC less than
| 40% has been played more than once.
|
| There's a genuinely humbling scene in the 2002 documentary
| "Scratch" where DJ Shadow, a world-renowed DJ and producer, wades
| trough stacks of EPs out of a record store in NY that have never,
| ever been played once[1], which perfectly captures how little of
| the musical output being recorded we actually get to listen to.
|
| Making music is very easy. Making music people want to listen to
| is hard, mind-bogglingly so. For every whitebread pop track
| you've heard on the radio, there's thousands of other similar
| tracks that have been discarded by an A&R, a radio DJ, some
| label, or simply by the audience.
|
| I'm saying this with no ill feelings towards you or your work,
| but I can't concieve even the flimsiest of reasons why anyone
| would ever listen to (or license/sync/track/ ) any of those
| generated songs once the novelty of "music made by the AI" is
| gone.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gpKYnRdf0A&t=6s
| jastanton wrote:
| > I can't concieve even the flimsiest of reasons why anyone
| would ever listen to (or license/sync/track/ ) any of those
| generated songs once the novelty of "music made by the AI" is
| gone.
|
| Easy: Independent/single-dev operations needing some quick
| background music for a project (game, whatever)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-03 23:00 UTC)