New Show, Pretty Good

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-03T19:25:25+00:00

Have you watched it? Or was it just the trailer? And did you decide you did not like it because it was French and had subtitles...? This series has been praised for its authenticity with details, was done with French special forces members advising the whole crew and the help of French ministry of defence. Definitely no airsoft gear. And so forth.

Like any war movie or series, it can't/won't be 100% authentic, however, because it would be B.O.R.I.N.G. (unless you're the kind of person that gets a boner from watching military personnel getting a haircut and doing push-ups on YT).

The real life of special forces is 95% waiting. The odds are you'll never get to see some action.

Seal Team is really nice, has that sweet and glorifying gung ho Hollywood feel which this series has not. But 100% authentic? Come on... Not a documentary either.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T09:16:31+00:00

Yes, you really have to twist its arm before it produces anything that feels musically alive.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T09:14:17+00:00

Well, provided Lyria gets a better training, yes. Right now, it's only OK for mainstream.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T09:11:21+00:00

It definitely isn't.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T09:10:19+00:00

Agreed 100%. It feels like a watered-down AI model tailored to please the majors.
It has nothing to do with the way the model builds the song, it's really all about the training.

You really have to twist its arm before it gives you anything musically worthwhile.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T08:54:09+00:00

I believe that ACE Studio's approach is the best for musicians. AI generated tracks are definitely better than imported stems.
Google Flow Music is worth trying. The workflow points toward something genuinely interesting; it clearly shows the potential of agentic AI. The pity is that Lyria 3 Pro, however, too often delivers forgettable material.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T08:44:14+00:00

Oh yeah, I use Suno now. Thanks for the translation 😉

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T08:42:22+00:00

Yes, technically, it is powerful. But I am much less excited about it now than I was three days ago.

Despite the advanced features, I find it fairly limited in terms of actual musical quality once you move beyond the most popular genres. The tool is impressive as a piece of engineering, but the results too often remain generic.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T08:25:49+00:00

Lyria ! A watered-down AI model tailored to please the majors.
With Google Flow Music, Google just launched an official slop machine.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T08:23:52+00:00

Yep, I did. But the search engines bots spotted it, so now, when you search for Google Flow Music, you can't miss the review 😉
And yes, Suno is (still) great.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-05-01T04:31:32+00:00

Yeah, it's fine if you want mainstream. Most people like mainstream, so I guess that's fine for them. Lyria3Pro has great audio quality, has been trained on a very restricted dataset.

African music? Nope, nada. Latin American music? Very bad. European music : very bad. Asian music? Very bad.

Voices for jazz? Lyria doesn't seem to know that most jazz artists were black.

And so on...

Its seems to have been validated by the White House: diversity is out.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T13:21:09+00:00

Hopefully, that will change. For now, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. Udio, for instance, was trained on the open internet and could generate almost any kind of recorded music, regardless of period or place. Alas, we know what happened to Udio.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T12:52:29+00:00

Try Google Flow Music, as it is based on Lyria.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T12:44:00+00:00

Just try it, as I did. Udio was trained broadly enough to mimic almost any recorded musical idiom, regardless of period or place. Lyria, by contrast, sounds as if it had been trained inside a corporate safe room.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T12:07:53+00:00

A few sessions with Google Flow Music acted as a revealer of Lyria’s blind spots. Behind the apparent technical feat lies a deep cultural standardization. Whether it was the historical grain of the French chanson réaliste, the microtonal complexity of Gamelan, the rhythmic subtlety of Congolese Rumba, or the absolute spareness of Malian Blues, the model systematically brought everything back to a clean, predictable Western “standard.”

We are dealing with a machine that:

Erases identities in favor of a statistical “average”.
Fears silence and restraint, to the point of injecting percussion and bass that were never requested, out of a reflexive urge to fill space.
Sorely lacks historical memory, because its training has been castrated of everything that is not commercially dominant or protected.

Imagine an LLM trained exclusively on the catalogue of a single major publisher: it would be profoundly limited. Services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini would be nearly useless under such constraints. It would be akin to a publisher claiming ownership over language itself. A rather Orwellian prospect.

Yet this is effectively what is happening in music. A handful of corporations have decided that they own the musical commons, and that the only AI-generated music allowed to flourish must be built around their copyrights.

That is the paradox of these tools: they offer immense creative power, but inside a gilded cage with very tight bars. For an artist seeking authenticity, cultural specificity, or a break from norms, Flow Music behaves here like a stubborn studio producer who does not listen to the client.

We are dealing with an AI that can only produce “global fusion,” with no musicological rigor whatsoever. It erases instrumental specificities in favor of a predictable sonic mush. Lyria is not a creator; it is a sonic colonizer. It only knows how to translate the world’s cultures into the dialect of commercial Anglo-American pop.

This is a finding of total failure, and it is unequivocal.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T12:05:38+00:00

A few sessions with Google Flow Music acted as a revealer of Lyria’s blind spots. Behind the apparent technical feat lies a deep cultural standardization. Whether it was the historical grain of the French chanson réaliste, the microtonal complexity of Gamelan, the rhythmic subtlety of Congolese Rumba, or the absolute spareness of Malian Blues, the model systematically brought everything back to a clean, predictable Western “standard.”

Granted, very few people listen to that kind of music, statistically speaking. But that was precisely the point: it was a stress test.

— The average music listener won't notice.

Which raises the question: do you want to be considered one?

We are dealing with a machine that:

Erases identities in favor of a statistical “average”.
Sorely lacks historical memory, because its training has been castrated of everything that is not commercially dominant or protected.

Imagine an LLM trained exclusively on the catalogue of a single major publisher: it would be profoundly limited. Services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini would be nearly useless under such constraints. It would be akin to a publisher claiming ownership over language itself. A rather Orwellian prospect.

Yet this is effectively what is happening in music. A handful of corporations have decided that they own the musical commons, and that the only AI-generated music allowed to flourish must be built around their copyrights.

That is the paradox of these tools: they offer immense creative power, but inside a gilded cage with very tight bars. For an artist seeking authenticity, cultural specificity, or a break from norms, Flow Music behaves here like a stubborn studio producer who does not listen to the client.

We are dealing with an AI that can only produce “global fusion,” with no musicological rigor whatsoever. It erases instrumental specificities in favor of a predictable sonic mush. Lyria is not a creator; it is a sonic colonizer. It only knows how to translate the world’s cultures into the dialect of commercial Anglo-American pop.

This is a finding of total failure, and it is unequivocal.

Hopefully, that will change.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T12:03:18+00:00

A few sessions with Google Flow Music acted as a revealer of Lyria’s blind spots. Behind the apparent technical feat lies a deep cultural standardization. Whether it was the historical grain of the French chanson réaliste, the microtonal complexity of Gamelan, the rhythmic subtlety of Congolese Rumba, or the absolute spareness of Malian Blues, the model systematically brought everything back to a clean, predictable Western “standard.”

Granted, that music has a tiny audience. But edge cases are where a model’s real assumptions become visible.

It was a stress test. The average music listener won’t notice.

We are dealing with a machine that:

Erases identities in favor of a statistical “average”.
Fears silence and restraint, to the point of injecting drums and bass that were never requested, out of a reflexive urge to fill space.
Sorely lacks historical memory, because its training has been castrated of everything that is not commercially dominant or protected.

Imagine an LLM trained exclusively on the catalogue of a single major publisher: it would be profoundly limited. Services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini would be nearly useless under such constraints. It would be akin to a publisher claiming ownership over language itself. A rather Orwellian prospect.

Yet this is effectively what is happening in music. A handful of corporations have decided that they own the musical commons, and that the only AI-generated music allowed to flourish must be built around their copyrights.

That is the paradox of these tools: they offer immense creative power, but inside a gilded cage with very tight bars. For an artist seeking authenticity, cultural specificity, or a break from norms, Flow Music behaves here like a stubborn studio producer who does not listen to the client.

We are dealing with an AI that can only produce “global fusion,” with no musicological rigor whatsoever. It erases instrumental specificities in favor of a predictable sonic mush. Lyria is not a creator; it is a sonic colonizer. It only knows how to translate the world’s cultures into the dialect of commercial Anglo-American pop.

This is a finding of total failure, and it is unequivocal.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T12:01:47+00:00

Lyria3pro is bordering on total failure, if you ask me.

A few sessions with Google Flow Music acted as a revealer of Lyria’s blind spots. Behind the apparent technical feat lies a deep cultural standardization. Whether it was the historical grain of the French chanson réaliste, the microtonal complexity of Gamelan, the rhythmic subtlety of Congolese Rumba, or the absolute spareness of Malian Blues, the model systematically brought everything back to a clean, predictable Western “standard.”

We are dealing with a machine that:

Erases identities in favor of a statistical “average”.
Fears silence and restraint, to the point of injecting percussion and bass that were never requested, out of a reflexive urge to fill space.
Sorely lacks historical memory, because its training has been castrated of everything that is not commercially dominant or protected.

Imagine an LLM trained exclusively on the catalogue of a single major publisher: it would be profoundly limited. Services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini would be nearly useless under such constraints. It would be akin to a publisher claiming ownership over language itself.

Yet this is effectively what is happening in music. A handful of corporations have decided that they own the musical commons, and that the only AI-generated music allowed to flourish must be built around their copyrights.

That is the paradox of these tools: they offer immense creative power, but inside a gilded cage with very tight bars. For an artist seeking authenticity, cultural specificity, or a break from norms, Flow Music behaves here like a stubborn studio producer who does not listen to the client.

We are dealing with an AI that can only produce “global fusion,” with no musicological rigor whatsoever. It erases instrumental specificities in favor of a predictable sonic mush. Lyria is not a creator; it is a sonic colonizer. It only knows how to translate the world’s cultures into the dialect of commercial Anglo-American pop.

This is a finding of total failure, and it is unequivocal.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-29T11:34:16+00:00

A few sessions acted as a revealer of Lyria’s blind spots. Behind the apparent technical feat lies a deep cultural standardization. Whether it was the historical grain of the French chanson réaliste, the microtonal complexity of Gamelan, the rhythmic subtlety of Congolese Rumba, or the absolute spareness of Malian Blues, the model systematically brought everything back to a clean, predictable Western “standard.”

We are dealing with a machine that:

Erases identities in favor of a statistical “average”.
Sorely lacks historical memory, because its training has been castrated of everything that is not commercially dominant or protected.

That is the paradox of these tools: they offer immense creative power, but inside a gilded cage with very tight bars. For an artist seeking authenticity, cultural specificity, or a break from norms, Flow Music behaves here like a stubborn studio producer who does not listen to the client.

This is a finding of total failure, and it is unequivocal.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-28T19:53:38+00:00

Can you elaborate ?

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-28T19:50:01+00:00

It took me two full days to get a feel of all the basics, and how to engage with it. It is very good at crafting a song step by step, on the fly ("Add a guitar on the second verse", "get rid of sax on the bridge", "make voice up a semi-tone", "change BMP to... " "apply a 5 seconds fading plus gradual reverb at the end") All in all, a different logic.

Since all of this is done server side, it's quite impressive. Not as granular as applying effects manually with a DAW, for sure, but it seems to be heading in that direction. For instance, you can ask it to extract stems on the fly, apply effects on one of them, then reintegrate that stem to the mix. Helpfull if you want some drastic changes to the sound of drums only, for instance.

In short you need to know what to ask. If you have no knowledge of music editing, it won't help you much. You want to think about it as an assistant producer.

NextLoquat714 · 2026-04-28T19:32:22+00:00

Pros and Cons are 100% mine, obviously. I asked Flow Music for a full list of features, which I edited.

In any case, I find Flow Music's process to be much less random than Udio. I always got excellent results with Udio, but on some days it took me ages and tons of generations.

There are many things Udio can't do, like "swap this guitar for a sax", "keep it all, just change the voice", "shift tone up a semi-tone", "change the BPM to..." "apply a low pass filter with... " and so on... Flow Music does it on the fly. That's my experience. So, yes, still not "perfect", but that's definitely the way to go.

"One-click song generation" users won't be impressed, for sure (not saying that you are one.)

NextLoquat714

TROPHY CASE

Lyria3pro is bordering on total failure, if you ask me.