AI music makers are crushing it right now. The two titans of the field are Udio and Suno, both of which generate astonishingly good music tracks from nothing more than a basic text prompt.
The beauty of this kind of music production is you don’t have to worry about the mechanics of recording and mixing. All you have to do is use your ears to curate the best results, and stitch clips together to make a full track.
I decided to put the two market leaders to the ultimate test — mano a mano — to see which tool could create the best tracks from the same text prompts. I tried a mix of super simple prompts, and progressed to more complex ones offering more flexibility.
The making of an AI song track
In order to use these services, you enter a text prompt in a box – along with genre, instruments and other relevant details — and press the Create button. You then select the result you prefer out of the two short clips that are generated by the service, and extend each subsequent segment until you generate a full song of 3 minutes or more.
I also wanted to measure not just final results, but the effort required. This includes generation time, tweaking and segment stitching. This Hassle Factor is marked out of 10 (higher numbers are worse), to reflect the effort needed to generate a full song.
I thought I’d start with the most basic of all modern popular song genres, the 12 bar blues. The prompt couldn’t be more simple, just eight words. So let’s dive in.
1. A 12 bar blues song about losing my dog.
Udio
Udio automatically added five additional bluesy tags to my prompt. I breezed through the creation process in just 16 minutes, with almost no corrections needed.
Simple songs with auto-generated lyrics can be produced very fast if you’re in a hurry. Although, as we’ll see later, the opposite applies if you want to exert more fine grained control over the final result.
- Quality: Nice traditional blues guitar and vocal. Simple and authentic sounding. Abrupt ending though
- Time: 16 mins
- Hassle Factor: 2/10
- Pros: Slick interface, easy tracking of segments, easy curation.
- Cons: Naff ending
- Overall Score: 8/10
Suno
I was one of the first Suno subscribers when it first came out and loved it. Unfortunately the latest version seems to have lost some of its sparkle for some reason. But again the result was generated very quickly. The service added ‘blues soulful slow’ to my prompt, and the full song was generated in just 11 minutes.
Unfortunately that was the extent of the good news. The track was delivered with a weird structure which I had to correct, the prompt disappeared after the first generation, the lyrics were auto-repeated for some reason, and the ending was terrible.
- Quality: Starts well, nice female vocals, repeated verses boring, and abrupt ending not good.
- Time: 11 mins
- Hassle Factor: 8/10
- Pros: nice first generation, with clip length of 1:40 secs
- Cons: Bad song structure, zero outro control, repeated lyrics, bad ending.
- Overall Score: 3/10
2. An EDM dance track about party nights
Udio
The prompt auto expanded to include electronic, club, dance, house and more. The generation cycle was straightforward, the auto-generated lyrics felt good, and the inclusion of a mid song rap and the sea noises at the start really added to the island dance pop feel. Delivered a nice outro and ending, too.
- Quality: Nice bubbly Ibiza style dance-fest. Good rap, easy generation cycle.
- Time: 18 mins
- Hassle Factor: 3/10
- Pros: Nice atmosphere, bubbly feel, good quality ending.
- Cons: Vocal audio quality a little suspect.
- Overall Score: 6/10
Suno
Although the prompt included high energy EDM club, the track is actually more like a standard electro pop. The biggest problem was Suno refused to let me extend the track beyond the first 1:23 mins segment. I tried repeatedly and then gave up. At least the service gave a full refund on the tokens used. Shame, it might have turned out quite nicely.
- Quality: Nice electro pop.
- Time: 33 seconds
- Hassle Factor: 9/10
- Pros: Good start, nice vocal
- Cons: Refused to extend because of technical issues.
- Overall Score: 2/10
3. A heavy metal rock track about being lovesick in Seattle
Udio
My starting prompt grew a lot once Udio added its automatic tags. The result was a grungy but boring rock track. It took a fair amount of effort to get beyond repetitive riffs, which wasn't helped by some pretty lame auto lyrics. I actually had to restart things twice to get anything decent.
- Quality: Pedestrian rock. Lyrics and melody also sub-par
- Time: 40 minutes
- Hassle Factor: 7/10
- Pros: Catchy starting riff, reasonable ending
- Cons: Lyrics poor, repetitive boring riff, too much work.
- Overall Score: 4/10
Suno
The final prompt included hard rock and classic rock, and the result was actually pretty good. Unfortunately, as with many Suno generations, the song comes to a pause mid track, as though it’s expecting to end. This is apparently common unless you fiddle around with segment timings — not great if you want to create something quickly. The ending was also awful, mainly because it’s hard to specify an outro if you’re not doing a custom generation.
One annoying thing about Suno (and to a lesser extent Udio) is the tendency for the auto-generated lyrics to use words from the prompt, especially instruments (e.g. "my bass line is playing…"). It’s a lazy way to avoid having to come up with decent relevant original lyrics of its own.
- Quality: Nice classic rock start, dodgy generated lyrics,
- Time: 15 minutes
- Hassle Factor: 3/10
- Pros: Good start, decent vocal, adequate melody and riff
- Cons: Weird pause mid-way, awful ending again.
- Overall Score: 4/10
4. A country song about divorce
Udio
In this track I wanted to test the custom lyrics feature of both services, so I created some in ChatGPT 4, and used those instead of auto-generated lyrics.
The result was a much longer creation time, but improved aesthetics. Obviously the best is to write your own lyrics from scratch. Bonus points if you can spot the hallucinated lyric spot.
In both services I added a lot of extra tags to the prompt to try and deliver the best country ‘feel’ for the track.
- Quality: Clear, high quality vocals, overall authentic classic country sound.
- Time: 53 mins
- Hassle Factor: 5/10
- Pros: Nice country feel, good use of instruments, good ending
- Cons: Some jarring disconnects between lyrics and tune
- Overall Score: 7/10
Suno
Country music definitely seems to be sympathetic to the AI treatment. The melody and vocals start out excellently. For some strange reason, Suno decided to ignore most of the custom lyric input, and instead created its own lyrics — not good for budding lyricists. The outro is almost completely hallucinated.
- Quality: Trademark flat Suno vocal audio quality detracts from the song
- Time: 32 mins
- Hassle Factor: 6/10
- Pros: Traditional country style melody, nice guitar solo
- Cons: Ignored lyrics, hallucinated verse and outro despite custom lyrics. No proper outro feature.
- Overall Score: 3/10
5. A Hip hop rap track about Mom’s spaghetti
Udio
For this test I used one of the most powerful features in Udio, browsing the catalog to copy prompt and genre information. I also added some extra prompt details, including mellow, poetic, abstract hip hop and others. The result is definitely a bit West Coast.
- Quality: Audio quality a bit subpar.
- Time: 75 mins
- Hassle Factor: 7/10
- Pros: Quirky unusual song, hilarious lyrics about food and cooking
- Cons: Needed massive genre shift mid-song to break out of monotonous riff. Bit random.
- Overall Score: 5/10
Suno
Another Suno track which refused to extend beyond the first 1:03 mins. The platform is either suffering from serious overload or bad design. Either way, it’s a frustrating barrier to those trying to be creative.
- Quality: Trademark flat Suno vocal audio quality degrades the song
- Time: 83 mins
- Hassle Factor: 9/10
- Pros: First generation started well. Nice hip hop groove...
- Cons: Failed to finish song.
- Overall Score: 2/10
6. An R&B, groove track about loving you in the moonlight
Udio
The full prompt turned out to be huge. An R&B song about sharing love and the moonlight, style of George Benson, guitar, smooth soul, electric piano, r&b, soul, funk soul, rhythm & blues, r&b/soul, rhythm and blues, alto saxophone, saxophone. Udio removes any artist names, and replaces them with style tags, but it’s worth adding. The result was really good.
- Quality: Very smooth track. Took some work to join clips, but it came out well. Nice guitar solo.
- Time: 180 mins
- Hassle Factor: 6/10
- Pros: Beautifully arranged smooth soul/jazz. Steely Dan eat your heart out.
- Cons: Had to wrestle with one stubborn clip, took an hour. Not fun.
- Overall Score: 9/10
Suno
Once again Suno produces a great first segment, in this case almost 2 mins long. But just when you think things are going great, the horrible interface and clip merging process gets in the way. There are two strange 7-second pauses midway in the song, as if the AI is trying to decide what to do. Add some strangely monotone vocals. What could be a decent track degrades a lot.
- Quality: Song let down by monotone vocals and lacklustre lyrics
- Time: 26 mins
- Hassle Factor: 7/10
- Pros: Decent first 2 min clip, extensions lose fidelity and coherence
- Cons: Strange repeated lyrics and car crash ending.
- Overall Score: 3/10
7. A Stand up Comedy set on an AI robot
Udio
Surprisingly, AI can produce almost passable stand-up comedy. It sounds weird, but it almost, kind of works.
- Quality: Pretty good results considering it’s spoken word, not music.
- Time: 30 mins
- Hassle Factor: 4/10
- Pros: After a bit of prompt tweaking, results were pretty consistent, especially the laughs
- Cons: Random variations in the voice tone during delivery
- Overall Score: 6/10
Suno
Suno does a surprisingly decent attempt at stand-up comedy. The laughs are more random than Udio, but at least they sort of follow the prompts in the custom lyrics box.
- Quality: Actually not bad. Laughs are a bit lackluster, but it tries its best.
- Time: 40 mins
- Hassle Factor: 5/10
- Pros: Easiest track to stitch together, good ending at last.
- Cons: Took a few generations to get there, audio degrades badly towards the end
- Overall Score: 4/10
So which AI model won?
| Prompt | Udio | Suno |
|---|---|---|
| A 12 bar blues song about losing my dog | 8/10 | 3/10 |
| An EDM dance track about party nights | 6/10 | 2/10 |
| A heavy metal rock track about being lovesick in Seattle | 4/10 | 4/10 |
| A country song about divorce | 7/10 | 3/10 |
| A Hip hop rap track about Mom’s spaghetti | 5/10 | 2/10 |
| An R&B, groove track about loving you in the moonlight | 9/10 | 3/10 |
| Prompt: A Stand up Comedy set on an AI robot | 6/10 | 4/10 |
The AI music era is here to stay. It’s early days, but it’s easy to see how this tech will just keep getting better. Udio in particular has gone from strength to strength, with added features and ease of use.
Suno has unfortunately gone backward in almost everything since launch. Coherence, audio quality, functionality and ease of use are now significantly worse than they were before. Such a shame.
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