Suno, one of the leading artificial intelligence music generators has finally released the much anticipated v4 model. This brings with it longer songs, improved tone and a much more natural sounding vocal across a range of genres.
The AI startup first went public with its original model in December last year as a plugin inside Microsoft Copilot. It was one of the first to combine music and vocals creating a full song. The release of v3 in March this year was the breakout moment.
One of the biggest issues with the earlier model came from the slightly robotic tone vocals. Version 4 has completely changed this, creating songs indistinguishable from human performances.
The new release comes as Suno faces lawsuits from Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and the Universal Music Group. They accuse Suno and competitor Udio of allegedly training the underlying model on copyrighted music without authorization. Suno says this was "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.
Scroll down for examples of Suno v4 tracks inspired by the Tom's Guide team.
What's new in Suno v4
v4 is here! 🔥 We’re super excited to introduce v4, enabling you to make any song you can imagine, with better audio, sharper lyrics, and more dynamic song structures. Try it now on https://t.co/oBkX6l74xL!New features powered by v4:✨ Remaster: Upgrade your tracks in v4… pic.twitter.com/u9fanARUYhNovember 19, 2024
Suno v4 isn't just an upgrade to the vocals and overall sound quality; the startup has also been working on related features such as covers and personas.
Personas allows you to create a custom vocalist based on previously generated songs, ensuring you have a consistent singing style across tracks. This now works with v4 and so the vocal will be clearer.
Covers, which were previously limited in terms of the number of uses, allow you to take a sound you've uploaded or another Suno track and create a new version. I used this to create a full song from a riff I'd had in my head for years.
Suno has also dropped Remaster, a new feature that lets you enhance a track you made with an older model to upgrade it to v4 quality.
Finally, there is a new lyric model that comes with v4 called ReMi. It is only available under 'custom mode' and it is much more creative, and unhinged than the earlier version of Suno's lyric model — which is still accessible and the default.
Examples from Suno v4
Here is an example of a track made in Suno v4 called Rust Never Sleeps
It took multiple attempts to get it to make this song in the "Grunge" genre specified by Tom's Guide How To Editor Kaycee Hill. Every previous attempt came up with a country style. I decided to regenerate the lyrics using a more defined prompt as just putting "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Grunge" for some reason was interpreted by Suno v4 as good ol' boy country rock.
This track made in Suno v4 is in the Rock genre and called Winner Stays On
This was a title and genre suggestion from Tom's Guide UK Editor-in-Chief Jeff Parsons. It was made using a simple text prompt "Rock song with the title Winner Stays On" and then adapted to use the Epic Rock genre for a better output as the others sounded to 'country'.
This track from Suno v4 was made when I was barely awake and called Foggy Mornings
I woke up for work amid the flu and my first thought was "my brain isn't braining this morning" so I put just that into Suno v4's ReMi lyric generator and left it to do its thing. I didn't specify a genre.
Outlook
Suno v4 is a bigger step up in realistic music generation than any previous model has achieved. After a minute or so you can easily forget it is an AI track you generated yourself.
This is going to allow anyone with an idea to create a song for a loved one, a track for a marketing video or music for a video game. Forget AI playlists, this will allow you to create your own Thanksgiving songlist where each song is customized for a member of your family visiting.
Maybe don't use the unhinged ReMi lyric generator when you're writing about that slightly suspect uncle that nobody really wants to visit. As Suno warns it: "May generate content that some find offensive".
