A wave of AI music tools have hit the scene in recent years, and they’re slowly getting better and better. From music mastering services to AI-assisted reverb, they’re helping to make audio production more accessible to beginners while enhancing creative workflows for professional users.
If you’re curious about which AI music tools are worth a look, here’s our list of some of the most impressive services, plugins, and software.
1. LALAL.AI Vocal Separation
Another area where AI has proven to be a great solution is stem separation. If you need to remove vocals from a song and keep only the instrumental backing track, LALAL.AI is one of the most capable tools.
It uses a neural network nicknamed Cassiopeia, which has evolved through several iterations, containing 20TB of training data, to get 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. Thankfully LALAL.AI allows you to upload 10 minutes of music and shows you a full preview of the extraction. You won’t be able to download the extracted stems, but that’s okay, because if the results suit your purpose, it’s worth paying for the service.
Unlike other AI tools, you don’t need a subscription. Instead, LALAL.AI offers one-time packages for 90 or 300 minutes of extraction, depending on what you choose.
Whether you’re stripping vocals to create a karaoke backing track or extracting vocal melodies to use in remixes, this AI music tool is the simplest and most efficient solution.
2. Jukebox AI
Jukebox AI is a neural net that aims to generate high-fidelity music with original AI vocals. It’s made by OpenAI, the same company and research lab that made Dall-E 2, which showed us that it’s possible to create AI images from text descriptions.
With Jukebox AI, it has taken another giant leap, this time in AI music. This can produce novel songs modeled after a genre or artist style, and taking a quick look through the jukebox sample explorer, you’ll find examples such as “Jazz, In the Style of Ella Fitzgerald” which surprisingly are convinced.
Considering the enormous task of encoding and reconstructing the musical score to train the model is still not perfect, the results are incredible.
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, it’s up to you to experiment with.
If you don’t have coding expertise, don’t be discouraged. If you’re dedicated to discovering the next best thing in AI music, there are tutorials online to guide you through Jukebox AI.
3. Lander AI Mastering
LANDR’s AI Mastering service is a handy tool for less experienced creatives who want to make final touches to their tracks.
Mastering music is usually a set of skills that takes years to hone, and even then, many musicians and bedroom producers will send off their tracks to be mastered by someone else.
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 with, such as changing the style to Warm, Balanced, or Open; With options for emphasis. But the point is to hand over your track to an AI engine and let it deal with the decision making.
You can try uploading a track and signing up for an account to see how it works for you. You won’t get much for free, however, and you’ll have to settle for short 20-second previews. Another option is to pay a one-time fee and explore the results in more depth. After that, you might want to consider subscribing to LANDR’s Studio Tools, which starts at $19.99 a month.
In any case, the cost of membership still won’t come close to the fees charged by a professional. 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.
4. Focusrite Fast Verb
With Focusrite Fast Verb, it’s all in the name. With the help of AI, you can work faster.
This AI software plugin will analyze your audio and select what it thinks is the best setting. This removes the long list of settings you’d normally tweak for a reverb plugin and leaves you with just a few options like selecting a natural, balanced, or artificial reverb profile.
Pro producers may have little use for it, but there will be those out there who want a hassle-free tool. As it has been trained on over half a million samples, you can expect some decent results as well.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to try before you buy. A curated list of Fast Verb example tracks will go some way to helping you decide, so be sure to check them out on SoundCloud.