A wave of AI music tools has swept over the past few years, and they’ve quietly gotten better. From music mastering services to AI-assisted reverb, they help make audio production more accessible for beginners while improving the creative workflow for pro users.
If you’re curious about which AI music tools are worth checking out, here’s our list of some of the most impressive services, plugins, and software.
Another area where AI has proven to be a fantastic solution is stem separation. If you need to remove vocals from a song and keep only the instrumental backing track, then LALAL.AI is one of the most powerful tools.
It uses a neural network dubbed Cassiopeia, which has grown through multiple iterations, including 20TB of training data to bring it to where it is now. Incredibly simple to use, it can extract vocals, drums, guitar, piano, bass, synthesizer and general accompaniment.
The results are impressive and worth trying for yourself. Luckily, LALAL.AI allows you to download 10 minutes of music and shows you a full preview of rips. You won’t be able to download the extracted stems, but that’s okay, because if the results are suitable for your purpose, it’s worth paying for the service.
Unlike other AI tools, you don’t need a subscription. Instead, LALAL.AI offers unique packages for 90 or 300 minutes of mining, depending on what you choose.
Whether you’re removing vocals to create karaoke backing tracks or extracting vocal melodies to use in a remix, this AI music tool is just about the easiest and most effective solution.
Jukebox AI is a neural network that aims to generate high-fidelity music, complete with original AI vocals. It’s made by OpenAI, the same company and research lab that created Dall-E 2, which showed us it was possible to create AI images from text descriptions.
With Jukebox AI, it took another big leap forward, this time into AI music. It can produce new songs inspired by a genre or an artist’s style, and a quick browse through the Jukebox sample browser will find examples such as “Jazz, in the style of Ella Fitzgerald” which are surprisingly convincing.
Still far from perfect, the results are incredible considering the colossal task of encoding and reconstructing musical scores in order to train the model.
Alas, Jukebox AI is not an off-the-shelf software that you can buy and use. However, the code is freely available online, and for those with programming experience, everything is there for you to experiment with.
If you don’t have coding expertise, don’t feel discouraged. There are tutorials available online to guide you through Jukebox AI if you are determined to explore the next best thing in AI music.
LANDR’s AI mastering service is a handy tool for less experienced creatives who want to polish their track.
Mastering music is usually a skill set that takes years to hone, and even so, many chamber musicians and producers will send their tracks off to be mastered by someone else anyway.
If you don’t have the skills to do it yourself, LANDR’s AI Mastering is a quick and easy alternative. There are a few options you can play around with, like changing the style to Warm, Balanced, or Open; next to volume options. But the point is to entrust your lead to the AI engine and let it take care of the decision making.
You can see how it works for yourself by uploading a track and signing up for an account. However, you won’t get much for free, and you’ll have to settle for a short 20-second preview. Another option is to pay a one-time fee and check the results more thoroughly. Then you might consider subscribing to LANDR’s Studio tools, starting at around $19.99 for a month.
Either way, the subscription fee still won’t come close to what a professional would charge. Of course, it won’t match the quality and expertise of a human engineer, but on the other hand, it makes music more accessible to the average person.
With Focusrite FAST Verb, it’s all in the name. You can get things done FAST with the help of AI.
This AI software plugin will analyze your audio and select what it thinks are the best settings. It removes the long list of parameters you would normally tweak for a reverb plugin and leaves you with only a few choices, such as selecting a natural, balanced, or artificial reverb profile.
Professional growers may find little use for it, but there will be people who want a hassle-free tool. Since it has been trained on over half a million samples, you can also expect decent results.
Unfortunately, there is no way to try before you buy. A curated list of sample FAST verb tracks will help you make a decision to some extent, so be sure to check them out on Soundcloud. Otherwise, you are left with two options: jump straight into buying for $89.85 or opting for the lease payment to buy for $5.99 per month.
Focusrite is a music industry veteran, so if you like the idea of leaving the hard work to the AI, there’s more to discover in its FAST bundle, including a limiter, EQ and compressor. powered by AI.
BandLab SongStarter is an AI-powered music generator that wants to inspire you to make music. You can tap the dice symbol to generate a random music snippet or enter text to help guide the AI.
It’s free to use, and the audio clips you create are also royalty-free, meaning you can use what the AI generates for your own purposes without worrying about copyright.
Some features require account creation, such as the “vibe” button that switches music between three different moods indicated by a Sun, Sunset, or Moon symbol. However, there’s another reason you might want to create an account, and that’s to use BandLab’s free online DAW. Check out our list of other free online DAWs.
Each AI-generated audio snippet, around 16-35 seconds in length, can be opened in the online DAW. Here you can see all the audio stems laid out in the Audio Workstation, including things like instruments, time signature, key, beats, and melodies.
SongStarter may look basic on the front end, but there are several useful ways to use it. For example, complete beginners can use it to establish a beat and practice writing melodies and lyrics over it. It can also be a great educational tool to show students what goes on behind the scenes in music production.
On the other hand, content creators can use SongStarter to create their own royalty free music which they can use for YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. Just as website builders help you create a website without coding knowledge, SongStarter can help you create music without much music theory knowledge.
While it might be strange to think of AI taking over some of the tasks we do in music production, there are some interesting benefits. AI mastering, for example, will allow less experienced producers to fine-tune their tracks, while LALAL.AI’s vocal separation tool will solve the difficult problem of extracting musical stems.
The AI isn’t there to write a song for you, but it could prove to be a valuable assistant. From content creators to newcomers to music production, we hope AI music tools will find their way to help more people create music.
