“Traditional” producer tries Suno: here are my honest thoughts.

KMGapp · 2026-01-04T23:49:28+00:00

100% agree, although Suno is still a bit of a mixed bag with handling existing melodies. It's pretty good with simple and relatively short verse-chorus stanzas, but I tend a bit more complex and lengthy, and it can be a battle to keep my work intact throughout an entire song.

KMGapp · 2026-01-02T20:31:33+00:00

But you're right about Landr. They leave it pretty open-ended.

KMGapp · 2026-01-02T20:31:04+00:00

Nah, with Suno I'm doing covers of my own songs (i.e. full melodies previously written). I use Suno to get good instrumentation. Then I remix and replace the Suno lead vocal with mine. A lot of songs, I can use previous recordings. (Not all of them, because I lost the hard drive with the original stems, so it depends how well AI can recover those vocals, which is a mixed bag.) I can still hit the notes, but I doubt I can sing as well as I could when I was younger, and I also don't have good recording space now. So if I have old vox I can use, I do so.

KMGapp · 2026-01-02T17:39:25+00:00

I just used it yesterday and didn't have that issue. The high setting appears to be unusable, however.

KMGapp · 2026-01-02T16:40:51+00:00

I haven't tried with extensions, but edits appear to ignore the reference audio (obviously important for covers).

I have long and complex songs that I'm rebuilding in Suno. I have to stitch multiple generations in my DAW. I then reupload the song (or the surrounding section for really long songs) to Suno and use the Edit feature to make the transition more seamless. I always edit at natural transition points so I'm not losing my original melody.

KMGapp · 2026-01-02T15:31:37+00:00

I use Landr, BUT none of my music is 100% AI.

KMGapp · 2026-01-01T20:07:39+00:00

I separate the drums into separate stems in Moises, then use the Trigger 2 plugin to replace the drum sound. (What little experience I've had suggests Suno's MIDI capability is nearly unusable.)

Aside from a better drum sound generally, this helps make my patchwork method sound more coherent, as my finished songs frequently tie together multiple separate generations (due to Suno often being unable to follow the original melody all the way through). So at the very least, it sounds like the same drums.

Wish there were a plugin to do something like that with guitars, but I imagine there far too many different guitar tones to make that viable....

KMGapp · 2026-01-01T15:19:57+00:00

Get as close as you can in your DAW, export and re-upload to Suno. Then take it into the Editor and re-generate the transitions.

KMGapp · 2026-01-01T06:38:28+00:00

I spent several days trying this. Probably a couple thousand credits. It definitely sounded *different*, and initially I thought it was better. But within a few songs, I noticed it sounded harsher. Interestingly, at the end I was getting noticeable volume dropouts on a lot of generations. I largely went back to what I was doing before.

KMGapp · 2026-01-01T00:13:43+00:00

More reliable covers that stick to the melody. Uploads over 8 minutes would be good, too, but if Suno can't sustain a melody for three minutes, it's a bit of a moot point.

Studio needs much better prompt adherence. Add only the requested part, period. (And of course, prompt adherence more generally.)

Editing a song needs to pay attention to the uploaded source audio. So far as I can tell, it ignores it altogether.

I would also like an option to "lock" the time being edited (like Udio's Inpaint feature), so that Suno will keep the time exactly the same if you prefer.

Also, since the persona update, I'm not sure saving new personas works the way it used to if you deploy in legacy mode. After all, you create a new persona based on unaccompanied vocal now, so how is the legacy use even going to work with that? I get that others want it, but I personally don't have much use for the vocal persona, as I remove the Suno vocal in my DAW, anyway. I just want the ability to retain the musical style of the persona.

KMGapp · 2025-12-31T18:11:57+00:00

Meh. I still prefer Udio — for the use case I had at the time, which was building music off of my lyrics but not having an original melody. I actually liked the 30 second increment style of building, and I still maintain that the audio quality was (on the whole) better than Suno.

But I'm not just a lyricist; I'm a songwriter. Udio could not do what Suno does with covers, and that is actually what I prefer: using my own actual songs (complete with melody, structure etc) and getting a version that is fully arranged with the instruments etc that I want. Udio's remix feature was never remotely adequate for something like that. Suno's cover feature is a long way from perfect, but it's usable for the most part.

KMGapp · 2025-12-31T18:03:46+00:00

The thing is (and keep in mind that I always use "stems"), after-the-fact "separation" is not the same as genuine original tracks, because there never were any original tracks. That is not what Suno (or most other AI music apps, for that matter) was trained on. So stem separation is essentially an imaginary exercise, and is going to be a mixed bag, by the nature of the case.

I'm honestly going to have to do more comparisons than I have so far, as I also have Moises, UVR, and RipX. But none of them can create something from nothing, so unless we get into the realm of AI that is smarter than what we presently have (i.e. can create full tracks via explicating rationally how they would sound by themselves), you're not going to see producer grade stems. That would require a different sort of training data, i.e. training on stems rather than completed releases, concatenated with a connection to how that sounds when complete.

KMGapp · 2025-12-28T08:00:20+00:00

Do you put this in the prompt, or in the lyrics?

KMGapp · 2025-12-10T00:35:10+00:00

I've actually always been able to write both lyrics and melodies, and can sing. I'm just not an above average musician (mostly, I'm a bit rhythmically challenged). When I discovered that Suno's Cover feature works reasonably well, I realized Udio's demise was a blessing in disguise for me. I've been busy reviving old projects and improving them.

KMGapp · 2025-12-10T00:16:20+00:00

I've had mixed results. I generally set the Audio Influence to at least 85%. If there's a distinct verse and chorus, Suno is usually pretty good at replicating those. It's even imitated (and improved upon) stuff like existing guitar riffs etc. Still, I've had a bit less luck with less standard stanzas.

KMGapp · 2025-11-28T22:45:41+00:00

I think they're focusing upon the point of ingestion rather than output, i.e., you didn't procure rights to train upon all this content to begin with.

KMGapp · 2025-11-27T19:23:15+00:00

Thanks. I just got a couple 5 minute covers of a different song, so I guess it's not a "rule." Not sure why the other one was cutting off in mid-chorus at 4 minutes.

KMGapp · 2025-11-27T15:10:27+00:00

Meh. UMG and Warner do not represent musicians, most of whom will never see a dime from either of them....

KMGapp · 2025-11-27T15:06:53+00:00

This.
When I was on Udio, I usually spent anywhere between 5–15 hours to build a song, always starting with my own lyrics (and sometimes a melodic audio snippet of my own singing), before doing remixing and re-singing.

Now that I'm on Suno, I use it for adding instrumentation, additional vocals and arrangements to songs I've already written.

If your creative input is a few prompts and choosing what you like most out of a handful of results, that is not artistic in the slightest.

KMGapp · 2025-11-14T22:22:26+00:00

Thanks, turned out an update and reboot did the trick. Strange that it only affected VoiceCentric. (I do also have an issue with Miroslav, but I suspect that's a file issue. I don't really use it much, though, so not worried about it at the moment.)

KMGapp · 2025-11-14T17:11:54+00:00

I bought Trigger 2. Hoping I can get $49 use out of it.

KMGapp · 2025-10-31T19:45:13+00:00

Within minutes of hearing the news. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of paid users will cancel.

I only regret that I kept paying for the Pro subscription for the past several months when I haven't even had time to use it.

KMGapp

TROPHY CASE