Historians may look back at 2023 as the year AI music had its "Midjourney moment". For the first time ever, people could describe music and hear original ideas played back to them almost instantly.
Text to music software lets us generate music, voices and sound effects from the thoughts in our head. Even descriptions of movie scenes can become music.
Five of the world's biggest tech companies have rallied behind AI text-to-music prompts as the defining feature of their new generative audio models. Those are Google (MusicLM, Lyria), Meta (MusicGen, AudioCraft), StabilityAI (Stable Audio), Microsoft (Muzik), and Adobe (Music ControlNet).
But it's not just big tech that's getting in the game. A number of innovative and independent companies are creating lyric-to-song generators. We've previously reported on some of them, like Splash Music, Suno, and Riffusion.
Suno struck a deal with Microsoft's CoPilot team in December 2023 and is now delivering white-labeled AI text-to-song generation as a B2B service.
In this article we'll review the best text to music software available today, giving you the resources you'll need to begin exploring this interesting new landscape for yourself.
Table of Contents
9 Best text to music apps in 2023
Other text to music apps (for non-musicians)
Musicgen
Website: MusicGen
Format: Hugging Face browser app
One month after MusicLM was released, Meta put out MusicGen. The audio quality is even better than Google's model and in our estimation is the only AI music generation tool that could disrupt the music industry in any meaningful way. Their text-to-song technology includes a melody condition where users can upload a recorded audio file and combine it with written instructions about genre and instrumentation to create an entirely new song.
The best way to get high quality music from MusicGen is to sign up for a Hugging Face account and create your own space. When you add a payment card, you'll be able to level up to their medium and large models. Instead of relying on local CPU, Hugging Face provides the computer power as a paid service.
We experimented with dozens of genres and found that it was particularly good at creating jazz, classical, rock, and chiptunes based on melody conditions. Try inputting a melody from the main soundtrack of a classic arcade game and see how it reinterprets it!
Each generation takes between 30 seconds up to 3 minutes, depending on the model you use. Once you've created it, you can take a listen and download it. For a detailed walkthrough on how to use and prompt the models, check out our full length article on MusicGen.
Stable Audio by Stability AI
Website: Stable Audio
Format: Website
Price: Freemium with $12/month
Stable Audio was brought to us by Stability AI, the company who first rivaled MIdjourney with their Stable Diffusion model. They are the first audio synthesis tool to go for a commercial model. Trained on nearly 800,000 labeled audio files from the AudioSparx directory, Stable Audio offers high quality text-to-audio service including both music and sound effect generation. Where it lacks in the music conditioning and extensibility of MusicGen, it makes up for in sound quality.
Suno AI song generator
Website: Suno AI
Format: Web app, Discord app
Price: $9-24/month for two tiers
After a year of steady engagement on Discord, Suno AI has migrated to a dedicated browser app. At the end of December 2023, they partnered with MIcrosoft Bing, delivering AI song generation to people of all skill levels.
Suno's AI music generator lets users type in original lyrics and describe the style of music they want to hear. Within a minute, two 45-second AI songs are delivered, complete with AI vocals in the genre of choice.
AudioCipher text-to-MIDI plugin
Website: AudioCipher
Format: VST/AU/Standalone for Mac and PC
AudioCipher is a MIDI generator that transforms words into melodies and chord progressions. AI generated music apps typically call for literal descriptions of music, but this VST lets you type in any kind of text.
Drag the MIDI output to your DAW and edit it in the piano roll until you arrive at something you like. Then choose your instruments and apply sound design to make it fully your own. In the end, the music you come up with will always stem from the words you chose at the beginning.
The main takeaway with AudioCipher is that text-to-music doesn't have to mean turning your creativity over to artificial intelligence. By focusing on the meaning or core idea behind the words you type in, you can break through writer's block while maintaining an active role in the song you're creating,
Version 4.0 of AudioCipher is currently in development and due for release in Fall 2023. Customers get lifetime free upgrades, so pick up a copy today to save on future versions of the app.
Output Co-Producer
Website: Co-Producer
Format: Browser app with wav files
Output is already a celebrated music software company. Their Arcade app is beloved by many music producers. As one of the more innovative players in their industry, it makes sense that they would step forward with this new AI music app suite, Co-Producer.
At the time of its release, Output's Co-Producer only offers one web app for public use. This text-to-sample-pack generatore provides users with a set of four songs based on their music prompts. But here's the catch - you can download the nearly 30 royalty-free stems associated with each treack for free.
Details other upcoming programs on Co-Producer has been omitted from their website. Visit the website to try the sample generator for free!
MusicLM
Website: MusicLM
Format: Browser and standalone app
The Google Arts and Culture team has been exploring AI music generation for years, notably with Magenta Studio, but MusicLM was the company's first foray into creating songs from text prompts.
We originally covered MusicLM in January 2023, when it was still just a technical paper published by their developers. In May 2023, they published a fully functional beta version that's free for anyone to use. You can access it in a browser or download the AI test kitchen from the App store to open it locally.
Google's text-to-song model was a big improvement on Riffusion, producing longer clips at higher fidelity. They accomplished this using three music datasets (MusicCaps, Audioset, and Mulan) that were trained on over 40 million YouTube videos. The music industry hasn't made much of a fuss over AI Test Kitchen's music generator, probably because the quality is still not good enough to disrupt real music recordings.
There's no limit to the number of clips you can create and some users in the beta have an option to download the files. However, the inconsistent access to downloading audio is one major drawback to using MusicLM.
Riffusion
Website: Riffusion
Format: Browser app
In December 2022, a free text-to-song app called Riffusion hit the scene. It made headlines for creating short musical themes from images of song clips.
The developers at Riffusion took an unconventional route, using Stable Diffusion to train on spectrograms, or images of sound waves, and then generate new images that they then converted into audio.
In October 2023, the company released a new and improved version of the app. Users can log in and build their audio library with text-to-music prompting. Like Chirp and Splash Music, users can also type in lyrics and hear them played back by an AI vocalist.
The company has also reportedly raised a $4M round, which should indicate plenty of growth on the horizon for this Riffusion.
WavTool AI DAW (GPT-4)
Website: WavTool
Format: DAW browser app
Ever wondered what it would be like to have a super-intelligent assistant by your side to help generate music? WavTool is an AI DAW that loads in your web browser and comes equipped with a GPT-4 text to music plugin for advanced users on the monthly premium plan. Prompt the assistant to create new tracks, adjust the mix, and even compose new melodies and chord progressions. It's a lot of fun and will have you wondering why other DAWs don't offer the same features!
We've previously covered the strengths and weakness of ChatGPT music prompts. WavTool's secret sauce is the ability to translate GPT's output into direct actions within the DAW. So instead of simply printing out a list of chords in plain text, you get a complete MIDI file.
Wavtool recently introduced a separate text-to-music sample generator that turns descriptive music prompts into sound effects and short loops. Their artificial intelligence toolset also includes a "continue" feature, for generating music based on an initial MIDI input.
Mubert AI text-to-music generator
Website: Mubert text-to-music
Format: Browser app
Mubert is an AI music generator that comes with a text to music web app. It's not their primary offering, but it's still a fun piece of tech to explore. You can enter prompts, set your track duration, and hit a generate button. In less than a minute, you'll have a complete song idea with details about the BPM and key signature.
Behind the scenes, your text prompt is encoded to latent space vectors of a transformer neural network and matched with existing labeled MIDI loop data. The closest tag vectors are chosen and sent to the Mubert API, where they generate entirely new music. You can find their Python code at this Github repo, if you want to learn more. They also offer a Google Colab environment for more nuanced experimentation.
VoiceMod text-to-song
Website: VoiceMod
Format: Browser app
Sometimes you just want to have fun without trying to create serious music. Voicemod's text-to-song app falls into that category. It's closer to a meme generator than a composition tool for musicians, but it's still an impressive piece of tech.
Users choose a genre and an AI voice to get started. Type in a lyrics and the app will create a short pop song. Part of their AI magic is the ability to match the cadence of your words with a melody that fits into the instrumental backing track. You can share the file with friends and have a laugh, but it won't take you much further than that.
Melobytes
Website: Melobytes
Format: Browser app for procedurally generated music
If Voicemod wasn't lofi and low brow enough for you, Melobytes should do the trick. This web app is great at producing harsh and absurd sound bites based on your text input. It's an AI generated music app, but not the kind of solution that most musicians are looking for. It's more of a crunchy meme generator for internet trolls.
Melobytes includes a number of musical parameters including language, tempo, tonality, and time signature. After experimenting with the site extensively, we're not sure how these attributes are mapped onto the text input. Go into the experience without high expectations and you'll probably have some fun.
Typeatone
Website: Typeatone
Format: Browser app
Typeatone is a simple web app built in 2016 for entertainment purposes. The site lets you use the QWERTY keyboard as a music keyboard. But instead of showing a standard piano interface, it takes your lyrics and turns each letter into a melody sequence. Click the music note icon in the toolbar to switch up your instrument from the default bell tone to a variety of other pleasant sounds. If you hear something you like, use the share icon to send it over to a friend.
We're excited to see how this space develops as AI generated music become more advanced in the coming years. Subscribe to the AudioCipher newsletter for the latest news on this niche!