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Congratulations on your launch!

I started music DRL (https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce) a few years ago. At that time, SOTA was still the "traditional" method of GANSynth.

Later, I mainly turned to Glicol (https://glicol.org) and tried to combine it with RaveForce.

There are many kinds of music generation nowadays, such as Suno AI, but I think the biggest pain point is the lack of controllability. I mean, after generation, if you can't fine-tune the parameters, it's going to be really painful. As for pro, most of the generated results are still unusable. This is why I wanted to try DRL in the first place. Also worth checking

https://forum.ircam.fr/projects/detail/rave-vst/

If this is your direction, I'm wondering if you have compared the methods of generating midi? After all, the generated midi and parameters can be adjusted quickly, it is also in the form of a loop, and it can be lossless.

In addition, I saw that the demo on your official website was edited at 0:41, so how long does it take to generate the loop? Is this best quality or average quality?

Anyway, I hope you succeed.

RaveForce is awesome, you have a new GitHub star! Glicol is fascinating, but to be honest I'm not sure what the use case for writing music with code is? Please follow up since I'm curious to learn more. RAVE VST is also awesome, I played around with it a lot when it first came out.

I 100% agree with your point about Suno AI. If you're an amateur you want to be able to have the ability to control and change the output, otherwise how can you call the music your own? If you're a professional, without the ability to control you can never achieve your specific goals! This is why we feel confident in our musician-first approach.

WRT Midi generation we are absolutely considering it, but we don't think we can really offer anything unique there. We believe our ability to create natural sounding instruments is key to enabling the creation of all genres of music. With that said though, the ability to generate MIDI is #1 on our Canny board so maybe that should be next :)

Our text-to-sound model takes roughly 10 seconds to generate, and our Infinite Sample Packs are instant since we pre-compute output to hide latency.

Thank you for your thoughtful questions!

There is a long history of using PureData, Csound or relevant languages for designing sounds or composition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N

Later SuperCollider and TidalCycles led the way in live coding. For me, I just wanted a tool that could write code, compose music or design sounds directly in the browser, play with friends and have sample-level control. From the perspective of sample level control, it seems to be two extremes compared with the black box of AI.

Very cool, thanks for the extra context!

Coming from some experience with supercollider, I admire your work on glicol! I think getting these tools to feel good in browsers is one of first steps to getting more adoption.

This is a very well written and thought out comment and I couldn't agree more.

To the thread OP, with all due respect, I'm not sure if your team is solving the right problem. You mention "We (Mark and Justin) started writing music together a few years ago but felt limited in our ability to create anything that we were proud of." but how does that indicate a problem with the tools rather than your mastery of the composition process?

Let me say it another way. The cambrian explosion I have seen in the space of bedroom pop paints a different picture, which is that a sufficiently motivated teenager can jump from wanting to write music to producing polished hits in months of focused effort, and from there, a signed record label contract. This cycle has been progressively shortening over the past decade with the improvement of at home DAW software/plugins and median quality of computer horsepower and entry-level audio hardware.

This is also not necessarily hidden knowledge -- across the many forums of bedroom producers, almost every one of them have had a phase where they believed the problem was their tools, which distracts them from improving their composition fundamentals, and which is almost always resolved by forcing themselves to write better songs with even more primitive tools. While this discovery took a bit more time when tools were more primitive, it is a process that hungry early-stage composers hit a lot earlier today given the power of tools and the expected level of sophistication they are all expected to have by the market. Indeed, I experienced this myself formally during university when my college music composition composer forced our classes to write songs with constrained pitch class sets and instruments. The constraints actually forced us to figure out how to use more primitive tools to their full potential by making up for it with creativity, rather than using more advanced tools to less potential by virtue of less creativity.

Combined with the rise of streaming audio platforms, it is also the case that the median level of conceptual polish as well as the bar for releasing a track that breaks through the noise has also risen. If every teenager excited about music can go from 0 to professional outputs in several months, then one would expect to see the results of that in the market -- which I have certainly seen.

My concern with your platform thesis is that it is optimizing a part of the composer's journey that you felt but which was not a material reality of your target power user's day-to-day for any period of time except the very beginning, and that you didn't do enough research into the market before building around a problem to solve. The comment I am replying to goes quite a bit closer towards solving what I see as the real problem: helping power users dial in closer to the sound they are looking for and already know how to get to, but simply in less time. Given that you have a professional DJ and producer on your team, I find it curious that this wasn't immediately caught and corrected for in your original market thesis.

If you do not correct this grave mistake in your thesis about the market, I believe your product is doomed to fail. You'll achieve success solving the problems of users who are doomed to never be successful musicians, but you'll fail to solve the problems of users who are on the arc towards becoming very successful, merely because you haven't made the deliberate choice to focus on them and their specific needs. If you did, I think you would arrive at a very different product.

I would describe myself as a good potential user of generative AI - I have an interest in electronic music, listen a lot, and like to play around with making simple tracks using LMMS and a MIDI keyboard. But have no background at all in music production.

What I'd be looking for is not generation of complete samples, but a tool that could coach me and assist me to achieve the sounds I am looking for with minimal technical know-how. For example, I might like to create a track with similar "instruments" to an existing track that I like. I could upload an mp3, the tool would identify the main "instruments", configure some kind of plugin for each of them, and then I could start making my own tracks using my keyboard and / or piano-roll. Eventually, I would graduate to making new "instruments", perhaps by generating variants of the ones that I have "favorited" in the past. Over time, I would become more adept at using the tools and interface available for tweaking the sounds.

I use Melodyne to help me deconstruct music I like. Most recently in conjunction with various stem separation services.

Works well for me, but I have to say that I have a taste for minimalism, so the my starting point is already quite basic.

Yeah, I have a room full of synthesizers, each with their own unique features and engines and workflow.

What I really want is to be able to feed a sample to the AI and have it spit out SYSEX that will reproduce that sample on my room full of synthesizers, so that I can go from Sample->Synthesizable Sound, i.e. turn the static dead of a sample into a dynamic reproduction with hundreds of modifiable parameters.

I'm guessing someone is working on this. Aphex Twin had a cute project along these lines, but I dunno where it went ..

If you aren't familiar with it, Synplant 2 VST does an incredible "sample -> synth patch" for almost any sound you give it

Yes, that is indeed incredible - but I'd love to have the ability to upload an inventory of the synths in my room, and have the AI use any (or all!) of them for reproducing that sample.

I guess we're pretty close to that .. keep an ear out!

Do I understand you right, something like this: "go from sound sample to a bunch of MIDI, each MIDI tuned to each of your synthesizers, which will then reproduce the sample as faithfully as possible" ?

Something like that would indeed be very cool. Hope I understood you correctly.

Yes, exactly. The AI would analyze the sample and then re-create the patches based on the synthesizer engine, in use .. so for example, I give it a sample of a bell, and it goes ahead and reproduces that bell, as close as possible, on the Yamaha DX7 FM engine, meaning that I not only get a playable patch (not a sample, which is often dead-sounding) but can also then alter the parameters using the synth engine itself.

Like I said, Aphex Twin had a project like this a few years back:

https://fo.am/activities/midimutant/

.. but it ran into some limitations - I'd love to see this updated with modern AI techniques.

Love this. Used jukedeck in the past and did a comp sci for music class at CMU way back in the day. After reading I understand your focus may be on people who would already classify themselves as musicians but I think theres definitely a world where you are making it easier for the amateur who makes music for recreation or are musicians in training (same market as Artiphon who I have worked with). One element of the UX as you describe is that text may be difficult, would you imagine having input being described the way some artists do with humming and audio descriptions? Something along the lines of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhOsxMhe8eo

I put together my initial thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAZAWBw7c7o

Wow, thank you so much for the in-depth landing page and product feedback! We absolutely agree that this technology can be used to enable people who haven't previously considered themselves to be musicians to write music. While we currently require that you use our tool with a DAW the next step is to enable full track creation all within our tool.

Also, I love your suggestion for humming and then using that audio as input to the AI. Our text-to-sound product (called The Forge in-app) does actually support you uploading your own audio and then you can add text and other prompting to modify it! I wouldn't say that particular functionality is fully developed yet, but your point is super valid since many musicians communicate rhythms and melodies to each other by imitating instruments with their voice.

Also, you've got a new subscriber :)

I've got a room full of synths and drum machines and samplers, so the core current offering is maybe a bit faster than what I already have, but not _different_.

What I _need_ is something that creates melodies, tones and textures that I _can't_ get from the gear I have: a brass ensemble playing into a Neuman u87 made in the 60s; a guitarist and flautist playing something soft and spooky; vocal chops. The stuff that people sample from film scores and then try to process so far that they can't be sued.

I couldn't see a way to get such sounds from your service. It looks like it only generates sounds I can already make with my existing gear and skills. Am I using it wrong, or am I not your target market?

Agreed with your sentiments! To answer your question: you are correct we currently do not support this. The next version of our product will be focused on stems, much closer to what you are asking for.

Cool. I’ll come back in a bit. Good luck with your journey.

While the generative AI tools for musicians seem promising, I'm skeptical about how much they can enhance creativity and originality in music production. There's a risk of over-reliance on AI, leading to more formulaic and homogeneous music. The human element and the "soul" of music creation shouldn't be lost in pursuing technological convenience.

I hear your argument but I'm not convinced that reliance on AI will lead to formulaic or homogenous music. Humans produce that stuff by themselves already.

Thank you for sharing! Our goal is to enable musicians to get their ideas out more quickly than they ever could before. Inspiration can be fleeting, and we hope that our tool and tools like it can enable everyone to seize those opportunities to write a piece of music that they are proud of.

I'm sure there will be a surge of unoriginality (like when auto tune was hot), but hopefully it'll drop to a murmur.

Awesome work! One thing I'm curious about in this space is why people generally generate the sound form directly. I always imagined you'd get better results teaching the model to output parameters which you could feed into synths (wavetable/fm/granular/VA), samplers, and effects, alongside MIDI.

You'd imagine you could estimate most music with this with less compute and higher determinism and introspection. Is it because there isn't enough training data for the above?

Thank you! There has been a lot of work on midi generation in the past and many people have gotten great results using the approach that you describe. The reason why modern music generators like ours create audio files directly is because midi can't represent all of the nuances of acoustic instruments (vocals, violin, trombone, etc). The allure of modern generative AI (diffusion networks and autoregressive models) is that they are finally capable of generating high quality audio which sounds natural.

If you're interested in really exciting work on applying AI to creating synthesizer patches, I recommend you check out synplant2: https://soniccharge.com/synplant2. Their tool can load in any audio and then create a synth patch which sounds nearly identical to the input audio.

That's a solid point about the limitations of MIDI, @kantthpel. Synplant2 sounds like a neat bridge between traditional synthesis and AI's capabilities. Wonder if it could lead to a hybrid approach where AI-generated parameters enhance MIDI compositions, making them sound more natural without fully ditching the efficiency of MIDI. Could be a game-changer for composers looking to blend electronic and acoustic sounds.

Thank you so much I'll check that out.

Very cool idea - I’ve been curious about text-sound approaches that allow for more granularity rather than just producing fully-formed tracks. Would be curious to know more details about the pitfalls of using Encodec with shorter samples. As a musician and software engineer, I could see lots of applications of this sample-first approach that don’t rely on the familiar DAW timeline/track UI, too.

Thank you so much! The biggest issue with Encodec (especially the 48kHz version) is that it is very dependent on normalization. This wasn't an issue for their use case (music) since music generally doesn't contain silent portions, but not so for samples. Many oneshots and loops have a great deal of silence or very quiet portions of the waveform, which when normalized become essentially pure noise. Training our custom autoencoder to handle this issue was one of the key factors which enabled us to get such good audio quality.

How much does it cost ?

I'm very interested in this ( although I'd rather have an API), but it's major red flag if I don't know the price

$10/month or $100/year for unlimited downloads

That's not bad. Thanks

This sounds really cool, congrats on the launch!

It seems the "Infinite sample packs" only generate samples, not loops? Or did I miss something?

Also, the pricing is a bit high and I'm not a big fan of the subscription model. To compare:

- Kick 2 from Sonic Academy, a kick synth, comes with a large library of samples and lets you control every parameter including pitch, transient, click, comp., etc. -- it costs $59 one time

- Reaper, a versatile DAW, is $60 one time

Granted, samples libraries use subscription and a similar pricing, but they usually offer a huge selection (and there are excellent free ones, such as Spitfire).

Soundry is at the crossroads between software and sample library.

Maybe a more generous free tier would help?

Where did you even find the price? I couldn't find pricing info anywhere on the site.

You need to sign up first, and then you get this:

https://i.imgur.com/Dl0Avg6.png

But once you close the window it's never shown again and hard to find (Google can't find it).

I guess they show it again once you reach the "25 generations"... which probably arrives quick, since every time you click on an "instrument" in a "sound pack" it apparently counts as 4 generations...

Ah, so you have to let them harvest your email address just to see what the price is. Lame. Thanks for the info.

We are adding the price to the landing page soon!

Very cool!

I'm particularly excited by the idea of gen ai creating entirely new sounds, sort of becoming its own kind of instrument instead of generating or emulating samples previously created / trained on.

Somewhat analogous to how the MPC etc. enabled a generation of musicians to chop and pitch and arrange soul samples into new types of hip hop music. Not super familiar with the history but I don't believe they thought it would be used like that.

I'd imagine a gen AI musical instrument just needs a lot more "knobs" to tweak and eventually someone will find that a particular "hallucination" sound to be interesting. Exciting times!

Absolutely! We couldn't agree more with your analogy

You have to create an account before you can even see what the pricing is. Sorry, but no. I'm not letting you harvest my email address just to see how much your service costs.

$10/month or $100/year for unlimited downloads

We are putting pricing up soon

I'm watching https://youtu.be/MT3k4VV5yrs, and I see current output, like drum kit, is an ensemble of instruments, can that be expanded to be stems? So you have the instruments as their own component, the ensemble performance broken down into those pieces for full on editing of the output. Rather than drag-and-drop ensembles, you then can modify all the instruments you're adding to your score.

Exactly! Our next product is focused on stem separation and generation. The ability to modify these generated stems is crucial since it will enable our users to craft the song to their needs.

I'm curious what you'll be doing in the stem separation space.

You can make it editable with https://samplab.com

This looks really great but also I expect there will be many such tools on the market soon. Are you going for the full VC backed route and if so, how would you meet their high growth expectations? I can see a really nice business here but the music software industry seems highly competitive and full of new entrants all the time.

It's quite true that there is a lot of excitement in this space, and that naturally comes with a lot of competitors. We were among the first movers with respect to AI tools for musicians, and we've seen that many others are having to move fast to catch up. Our unique insight is and has always been thinking about what musicians and music enthusiasts actually want, rather than blindly implementing a text-to-music model.

With respect to growth, our goal is to continue lowering the barrier to entry for people to write amazing music that they are proud of. Our initial product is focused on music samples, but by increasing the level of abstraction to remixes and then full stem generation we can literally enable more people to consider themselves to be "musicians." Adding music distribution to our platform will greatly improve virality and organic growth, since most people who make music want to share what they've made with their friends. We are confident that we can achieve our lofty goals by building a vertically integrated music creation and distribution platform.

Just wanted to say the video demo on the home page was very cool. Congrats and good luck!

Thank you so much! :)

This is a must to have for creating music. They have a real artist on their founding team as well and the rest are DJs and producers. Its better than those other fake AI companies making shitty music

Hell yeah, thank you for your support!

It's basically AI-powered Splice with being less PITA due to music licensing. It makes sense for me.

But I think while generated samples will be somewhat unique, overall sound would be mostly generic.

Yeah that's clearly what they're going for, and for now they're cheaper than Splice. But Splice selection is absolutely huge, while Soundry is very limited, and the promise of "infinite" is somewhat misleading.

A tool that generates random MIDI melodies is also "infinite", but it's infinitely crappy.

There's an inherent problem with "unique" samples, that they can't be reviewed and ranked by users, since each user only sees their own.

There's a chance a tool like this make users waste time instead of saving time, because you would need to listen to so many "generations" before finding something you like.

I've been working on a project where I take DNA sequences and convert them into sound - the result is always a kind of jazzy melody, but I don't have any of the rest of what makes a piece of music.

Would it be possible to feed the synthesized 'beep-boop' throughline my program outputs to the 'prompting with audio' portion of your pack and get the rest of what makes a musical composition? Or modify my program to output notes that feed into a text prompt?

As somebody who embraces technologies with a passion and has made electronic music for over 20 years this may be the worst idea I’ve ever seen. The only possible use I see is people who want generic sounding beats for a YouTube video.

Honestly, the AI start ups YC is funding appear uniformly bad ideas. Weird.

That's a strange take. I would argue this is MUCH better than every single person using the exact same 10 samples from the same library.

You can't think of ANY creative uses for this? After 20 years? It's just another tool, just like early hip hop sampling -> drum machines -> midi controllers -> etc etc

My problem with a lot of this stuff is what makes music the universal language is it isn’t made of words, it is made of sounds.

Using human language as an interface to the world of music defeats the entire point of the exercise. Neither of the founders is a professional musician, it’s missing the point of what it means to make music on so many levels.

The appeal of prompting a whole song into existence kind of baffles me for the same reasons you are suggesting but there’s room for fun and creativity in working with samples and given the substantial cottage industry that royalty-free samples already are this was pretty much the first application I was expecting to see in the audio GenAI realm.

Very much agreed! Our goal is to facilitate that fun and creativity that comes from playing with samples :)

I'm not sure if you had the chance to read our post, but one of our core insights is that very idea. Specifically, that words aren't always the best way to communicate what you need when writing music, and so our new product (the Infinite Sample Pack) enables folks to create new sounds without the need for text.

Also, it will be a real disappointment to Diandre when I tell him that his years of touring and releasing 100+ songs don't amount to him being a professional musician.

Fair enough. It’s not for me, but maybe somebody else likes it.

Apologies for the tone.

It really takes the soul out of making music. Why would you want a computer to design the sound for you? You don't learn anything, you can't honestly claim you made it or expressed yourself, and it won't truly be novel because the model is spewing out stuff based on what already exists.

Is this the first YC company to offer a VST?

Congrats on the launch! Great to see a genAI product that generates ingredients for creative use rather than just a finished product.

I can't say for sure, but this may very well be the first YC company to offer a VST :D

If this can pull off drum tracks “in the style of”, I’m in.

Absolutely! You can check out the many different styles in our Infinite Sample Packs. If you already have audio in the style that you want you can even upload that to our Pack Builder and get unlimited variations on it.

What do musicians actually want?

For me the exploration and creation of melodies and rhythms is the fun part and this takes it away from me a bit. I am not opposed to using AI in my music - I've been using Eleven Labs to create vocal samples that I've incorporated into some tracks.

I would rather have it generate a drum kit and patterns rather than samples of complete loops.

Thank you for your insight! We absolutely understand the desire to write your own patterns and melodies. From the very beginning we made sure to support one-shots so that folks like you can load them in to their sampler of choice and write whatever they desire. Our demo videos are focused on loops mostly because we want to keep things simple for the casual observer.

AI forge [0] was unable to parse my prompt "crunchy overdriven bass drum" due to a JSON parse error, replacing the spaces with commas fixed it.

0: https://app.soundry.ai/forge

Hey we had a rush of users earlier. It’s up. Still seeing issues?

Fixed!

Thanks for the heads up!

I've been following this space closely. There's some really interesting advancements happening here... Soundful for example can generate entire dance songs and they don't sound AI generated at all.

Seems like it has a lot of potential! I'd love to see some AI functionality in mastering tracks. Would love to be able to tune high hats to make it sound more full, etc.

Thank you so much! Yes, this is a great application of AI. We'll be adding that functionality in soon, but in the meantime you might be interested to learn about the work that Izotope is doing with Ozone: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/ai-mastering.html

The latest version of Logic Pro has introduced AI mastering, works pretty well imo

What will you do if OpenAI decides to release Jukebox2?

Then they'll use it.

This game is about product, not models.

The alpha and margin on models will trend to zero. Razor thin products like ElevenLabs will become commodity, whereas rich UI/UX will stay ahead.

OpenAI themselves will be stretched too thin to build for this market too.

Sure, good UI is important, but do you really want to be a wrapper around someone’s model?

> do you really want to be a wrapper around someone’s model?

There are so many models out there for all sorts of use cases. A lot of the weights are in the open and you can fine tune on top of them.

There will be no single "foundation model" that wins. There will be dozens of competing foundational models that are all racing to the bottom. The product build around them and the user base / community are what matter.

That would depend on what Jukebox2 ends up being :P

How much does it cost? Is it subscription-based? I can't find anything about it on the site.

$10/month or $100/year for unlimited downloads

Sorry to ask this here, it's bit off topic, but I'm looking for AI that can accept a chord progression that I write and make a track from it that someone can sign over. I'm a songwriter, but not that great a guitarist. It would be great if I could use the phenomenal AI we're seeing to make the instrumental track for new songs.

If you write your chord progression as midi then you can run it through a plugin like Heavier7Strings (https://www.threebodytech.com/en/products/heavier7strings) and it will be able to create relatively realistic sounding guitar. I hope that helps!

I don't know about phenomenal AI, but Band-in-a-box is a classic tool for this kind of thing.

Looks amazing!

You have a typo - presumably not VTS3 but VST3 :-)

Thank you for the catch! We'll make the change

congrats!

how did you determine market size? TAM etc?

Thank you so much! We computed TAM the best way: bottom's up! We estimated the number of current musicians, the number of people we could convert into musicians, and the annual subscription price, and then we used this to compute our total TAM. If you're interested to learn more and apply this kind of thing to your own work I recommend this video from SlideBean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_RMTC2YmXY&ab_channel=Slide...

Excellent video, thanks!

Looks good but having to download, then sign up just to see the pricing is infuriating.

You're the third person who mentioned this, so we'll be sure to add pricing to our landing page... Sorry about that!

i find it ironic that some people would dismiss tools like these solely because it's based on ML algorithms or whatever, as if the music you enjoy hasn't been significantly shaped by algorithms and digital processing.the modern music industry heavily relies on algorithms and computer programs to enhance sound quality, adjust pitches, and even modify the voice of the artist.... much of the music that people listen to today is, in some way or another a product of algorithmic manipulation.And no, tools like these won't render "modern " music any more 'banal',.After all, something that is already banal can't become "banaler"

Musicians want what all creators want: the ability to create and share their art with other people. Because global technology like YouTube actually makes that harder (paradoxically, you can share more but fewer people genuinely care), and because of the global push for artless music (modern pop), and because art is being usurped by the tech leviathan to show ads, musicians have little real venues to make music that truly comes from the heart.

So tech provides a bandaid with tools like this. You might think this will allow you to make more music and maybe it will, but it will just be of the artless kind that serves only for connectionless entertainment that will fill up another infinite scrolling algorithm to the detriment of all of humanity.

I would never use your tool nor want to listen to anything made by it.

Artists will use the tools available to them to create art that speaks to them and for them, regardless of how "artless" the tool might be.

Not sure if you've talked to many artists, but quite a large majority oppose AI, and in practice what "speaks to them" is art created without the interference of AI. (I am one of them, but there are many others).

Many artists also opposed the synthesizer.

I think it's too early to tell how this plays out.

Perhaps, with some issues, we should not let them "play out". I feel like our tendency to let things play out all the time has been a diaster for humanity.

It's funny, I've mostly encountered 'artless' as a complementary descriptor.

Launch HN: Soundry AI (YC W24) – Music sample generator for music creators