5 Impressive AI Music Tools Worth Checking Out

A wave of AI music tools has washed ashore in recent years, and they have quietly been 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 the creative workflow for pro users.

If you’re curious about what AI music tools are worth checking out, here is our list of some of the most impressive services, plugins, and software out there.

Another area that AI has proved to be a fantastic solution is in stem separation. If you need to remove the vocals from a song and just keep the instrumental backing track, then LALAL.AI is one of the most capable tools.

It uses a neural network nicknamed Cassiopeia, which has grown through several iterations, including 20TB of training data to get it 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 well worth trying out for yourself. Thankfully LALAL.AI allows you to upload 10 minutes of music and shows you a full preview of the extractions. You won’t be able to download the extracted stems, but that’s okay, because if the results are fit for your purpose, it’s well worth paying for the service.

Unlike other AI tools, you don’t need a subscription. Instead, LALAL.AI offer one-off packages for 90 or 300 minutes of extraction, depending on what you choose.

Whether you are removing vocals to create karaoke backing tracks or extracting vocal melodies to use in a remix, this AI music tool is just about the simplest and most efficient solution.

Jukebox AI is a neural net that aims to generate high-fidelity music, complete with original AI singing. It’s made by OpenAI, the same company and research lab that created Dall-E 2, which showed us it was possible to create AI images from text descriptions.

With Jukebox AI, it has made another huge leap, this time in AI music. It can produce novel songs modeled after a genre or artist style, and taking a quick look through the Jukebox Sample Explorer, you will find examples such as “Jazz, in the style of Ella Fitzgerald” that are surprisingly convincing.

Still far from perfect, the results are incredible considering the mammoth task of encoding and reconstructing scores of music in order to train the model.

Alas, Jukebox AI isn’t an off-the-shelf piece of software you can buy and use. However, the code is freely available online, and for those with programming experience, it’s all there for you to experiment with.

If you don’t have coding expertise, don’t feel put off. There are tutorials available online to guide you through Jukebox AI if you are dedicated to exploring the next best thing in AI music.

LANDR’s AI mastering service is a handy tool for less-experienced creatives who want to put the final polish on their track.

Mastering music is usually a set of skills that takes years to hone, and even so, many musicians and bedroom producers will send their tracks away to be mastered by someone else anyway.

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; alongside options for loudness. But the point is to hand over your track to the AI engine and let it deal with the decision-making.

You can see how it works for yourself by uploading a track and signing up for an account. However, you won’t get much for free, and you will have to settle for a short 20-second preview. Another option is to pay a one-off fee and check out the results in more depth. Following that, you might consider subscribing to LANDR’s Studio tools, starting at about $19.99 for a month.

In any case, the subscription costs still won’t come close to the fees a professional would charge. Of course, it won’t match the quality and expertise of a human engineer, but on the flip side, it does make music more accessible to the average person.

With Focusrite FAST Verb, it’s all in the name. You can get things done FAST with the help of AI.

This AI software plugin will analyze your audio and select what it thinks are the best settings. It removes the long list of settings you would normally tweak for a reverb plugin and leaves you with just a few choices like selecting a Natural, Balanced, or Artificial reverb profile.

Pro producers might have little use for this, but there will be people out there who want a hassle-free tool. As it has been trained on over half a million samples, you can hope to get some decent results too.

Unfortunately, there is no way to try before you buy. A curated list of FAST verb example tracks will go some way to helping you decide, so make sure to check them out on Soundcloud. Otherwise, you’re left with two options: leap straight into purchasing it for $89.85 or opt for the rent-to-buy payment of $5.99 a month.

Focusrite is a veteran of the music industry, so if you like the idea of turning over the hard work to AI, there is more to check out in its FAST Bundle, including a Limiter, Equalizer, and Compressor powered by AI.

BandLab SongStarter is an AI-powered music generator that wants to inspire you to make music. You can press the dice symbol to generate a random snippet of music or enter some text to help guide the AI.

It’s free to use and the audio clips you create are also royalty-free, meaning you can use what the AI generates for your own purpose without worrying about copyright.

Some features require creating an account, such as the “vibe” button which toggles the music between three different moods indicated by a Sun, Sunset, or Moon symbol. There is another reason you might want to create an account, however, and that’s to use BandLab’s free online DAW. See our list of more free online DAWs.

Each AI-generated audio snippet, roughly between 16 and 35 seconds long, can be opened in the online DAW. Here you can see all the audio stems laid out in the audio workstation including things like instruments, time signature, key, rhythms, and melodies.

SongStarter might look basic on the front, but there are several useful ways that it could be used. For example, complete beginners can use it to lay down a beat and practice writing melodies and lyrics over the top. It can also be a great teaching tool to show students what goes on behind the scenes in music production.

On the other hand, content creators can make use of SongStarter to create their own royalty-free music that they can use for YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. Much in the way that website builders help you to build a website without coding knowledge, SongStarter can help you create music without too much knowledge of music theory.

While it may be strange to think of AI taking over some of the tasks we do in music production, there are some interesting benefits. AI mastering, for example, will afford less experienced producers the chance to fine-tune their tracks, while the vocal separation tool by LALAL.AI solves the difficult problem of extracting music stems.

AI isn’t there to write a song for you, but it might prove to be a valuable assistant. From content creators to beginners in music production, we hope that AI music tools find their place in helping more people create music.