Mixcraft • Re: Experimenting with UDIO AI and other tools

I have been using Mixcraft for a long time now, but recently I discovered UDIO (and the other AI tools that everyone seem to be using to make the same song over and over).

It didn't take me long to conclude that I both hate and love Udio. Also, I am positive that programs like Mixcraft and other DAWs need to work on integrating with these AI tools because they are not going away, but that's not why I am posting here.

I decided to use UDIO to at least progress on those songs that at one time or another inspired me, but I then abandoned.
Either I could not find a decent melody to go with it, or arranging the song the way it played in my head was more than I could handle.

While playing around with Udio I discovered that one can upload an MP3 or WAV file to seed the song. That's precisely what I wanted to use Udio for (as well, as getting some help with lyrics and such).
Even if Udio's results are poor or trite, they are NOT what I would have come up with. Just having another "mind" trying to crack the same issue helps.
It reminds me of when I was a graphic artist and it would take me hours to choose a font when my colleagues were out of the office, while the process took me minutes if I could just show somebody two fonts and ask them "Which is better?"

Udio produces a lot of terrible stuff, but there are gems hidden in there. For instance, as an experiment I took the lyrics for "The Unfortunate Rake" (a song whose copyright expired centuries ago) and had Udio create a new melody for it. I like it and Udio seemed to capture the fornorness of the interpretation.
https://www.udio.com/songs/65ZtQLy3XMyiVSKYSHSEGp

The reason I am posting is different though. I discovered the UDIO is not musician friendly. It may be great for prompt makers willing to spend credits and hours to listen to a lot of crap and lots of audio artifact, but for someone familiar (but not well practiced) in music composition, Udio is incredibly frustrating.

For starters, each prompt extension Udio creates two somewhat similar versions. Some closer to each other than others, some with made up lyrics some sound like Udio had a stroke.

Occasionally, you get an almost perfect idea/song/composition, that somehow starts with an audio artifact like a rimshot, or bizarre sounds that are quasi-impossible to remove. Out of probably a hundred cycles, I was able to remove a rimshot once.

The one thing I found that I consider an absolute sin against musicianship is the tuning of the song.

Example:
1) I had a Rhodes based progression that went something like this: C, G/B, Bb, A
2) The second verse is close to Dm, A/C#, C and so on
3) The Eagle-Eyed will recognize the framework for Bowies "Is there life on Mars" but I swear when I came up with the progression, I had no idea. Once I realized the similarities, I abandoned it because I could not come up with a decent melody.
4) I also wrote some lyrics for it and after a bit of time, I had something I liked.

Unfortunately, at the same time my wife got gravely ill and I had to take her multiple times to the Emergency. Somehow, while sitting at home waiting for news from hospital, I deleted the song generations. Fortunately, I had downloaded some of the WAV files, which I used to generate this song below

https://soundcloud.com/marco-conti-8555 ... al_sharing

In the process of creating this song, I discovered the following:

1) File management in UDIO is a nightmare. I have taken to rename some songs with [XYZ-001][+1] to make them easy to find and to give them some mark that says "Do not delete".

2) The most disturbing thing I found, especially since the song above was created from a manually created "seed" (me hammering at a Rhodes patch), I knew exactly where Udio started.

3) Since I had deleted the original, but I downloaded it as a .WAV file, I run it first through Mixcraft stems feature (not so good) and then I used Moises to export the various parts.
The names of the parts look like this (these are the file names of my export from Moises)

Miles Apart.v2-bass-C major-100bpm-428hz.wav
Miles Apart.v2-drums-C major-100bpm-428hz.wav
Miles Apart.v2-guitars-C major-100bpm-428hz.wav
Miles Apart.v2-metronome-C major-100bpm-428hz.wav
Miles Apart.v2-other-C major-100bpm-428hz.wav
Miles Apart.v2-vocals-C major-100bpm-428hz.wav

Which tells me that Udio decided to take my C = 440Mz loop I uploaded, and changed the tuning for it drastically enough that Mixcraft's built in tuner cannot go that far and I had to use a stand-alone tuner to retune my guitars.
Why the 428Mz tuning?

Additionally, there are parts of the song where I suspect the tuning changes, because suddenly neither my guitar or Bass are in tune anymore. I think the song modulates to a different key, but also to a different Hz value. It's almost as of this AI wants to make musician's lived harder rather than easier.

Are there any tools I could use to try to optimize this song and any song with the same issues?
Is mixcraft Stems generator going to get any better? This song is hard, I'll be the first to say it. Moises also had a hard time separating instrument (bass especially)

The other thing I found annoying is the inability to write down the new chord progression Udio created from the one I uploaded. It would be nice if Mixcraft had a way to generate a track that could be used to take down notes, lyrics and chords. Manually or otherwise.

Software like Udio are not going to go away and for hobbyists like myself, they could be very inspirational (despite the totally terrible songs the make most of the time).
Because of Udio I am now working on at least a half dozen songs I had abandoned. At least a couple of them have promise. I don't care if an AI helped me inspire the songs, as long as I know that most of the songs are mine.

That said, I expect these tools to make my life easier. Tuning entire songs from 428hz to 440hz is not my idea of a good time. Likewise not being able to ask Udio for a certain key or BPM. If the problem is copyright, You tube seems to know copyrighted material. Hopefully they'll put something in place so that my own frigging songs don't get transposed.

In any event, my apologies, I am in the middle of Covid19. Hopefully 50% of the above makes any sense.

Here are some songs I made on Udio that I would like to work on eventually.

A remake of Unfortunate Rake (Folk, traditional lyrics are not mine and neither is the melody): https://www.udio.com/songs/628VrNmidkYgdsNwhwArto

Disco Zombie 1 (Lyrics mine): https://www.udio.com/songs/ma8RssTGFcLYbfV3dhGGM9
Disco Memories (Lyrics mine): https://www.udio.com/songs/vJnQLvVCkgpNrPeb74BnWg
Disco Memories Flashbacks (Lyrics mine): https://www.udio.com/songs/p4KJ5wh8bNsgU92gutd6Lh

The TL;DR is what can Mixcraft do to better work with the AI generators? In my opinion they are not going to ruin songwriting anymore than Drum Machines and loops based music haven't already done. They are going to be tools for people with a certain kind of talent. Can Mixcraft maybe position itself to make that talent shine?

Statistics: Posted by vizionheiry — Mon Jul 29, 2024 10:19 pm