I’m trying to figure out if Udio AI is good for creating AI-generated music, but I’m running into issues with getting realistic-sounding tracks. Has anyone used it and can share tips or feedback? I really need help deciding if this tool is worth learning more about or if there are better alternatives.
Used Udio AI a couple times—honestly, it’s kinda wild how close it gets sometimes, almost like it’s peeking at your Spotify playlist while standing behind you. But yeah, about realism, it can get weirdly uncanny. Vocals get mashed together into a weird robot chorus sometimes, and if you ask for anything too complex (jazz, prog rock, whatever), the results end up sounding like a fever dream at a karaoke bar.
Couple of tips: play around with your prompts. Be stupidly detailed, like ‘mellow acoustic guitar, warm vocals, 90s indie vibe’, rather than just ‘folk song’, and you get better stuff. Also, short tracks work better—anything over like a minute can lose cohesion fast, and the AI just starts improvising nonsense. If you want vocals, expect some gibberish words, unless you give really clear guide lyrics, but even then… well, you get AI-Simlish. Beats are hit or miss; rock is safer than anything orchestral, and electronic genres are where Udio starts flexing.
It’s absolutely NOT going to replace real human musicians for realism at this point—think of it more as a fancy sketchpad. If you’re okay with “pretty close but obviously not real”, Udio’s fun and can actually jumpstart some ideas, but if you need that “wait, was this made by a band?” effect, you’ll get disappointed quick.
Biggest pro: some of the musical ideas it mashes together are honestly hilarious. Let it go wild and you’ll get plenty to laugh at—or maybe enough weird hooks for your next track. But wow, don’t plan to just slap this on a production-ready project without some serious post-editing or replacing most of the parts.
In short: fun for experimenting, not for realism (yet). If you’re stuck or just want to hear a synth voice butcher your lyrics, give it a go. Otherwise, keep your expectations low and your prompts way too specific.
Honestly, I’ve been messing around with Udio AI too, and yup, I totally get where you’re coming from on the realism front. @mikeappsreviewer’s point about the vocals is dead on—sometimes it feels like you’re getting serenaded by Siri after a couple drinks. But I actually have gotten a few surprisingly decent outputs when I focus Udio on instrumentals only, rather than letting it try vocals at all. If you’re hitting a wall with that awkward uncanny-valley vocal thing, just leave the lyrics off and treat it like a jam generator for backing tracks or mood pieces.
I don’t 100% agree that you HAVE to be ridiculously specific with your prompts though. There’s a sweet spot: being too specific can totally box it in and make it do weird, literal junk, but being too vague gets you the usual generic AI soup. Kind of weird, but using 2-3 reference artists, one central genre, and a feeling or adjective (“moody, lo-fi, like early Radiohead but sadder”) actually worked better for me than over-describing the instruments, especially for electronic or ambient stuff.
Big thing I noticed—if you want realism, post-processing is your friend. Bounce the stems out of Udio, throw them into your DAW, and go nuts with EQ, compression, actual vocal samples, whatever. Udio isn’t great on polish, so don’t expect a straight-to-mixdown experience. But once you accept it’s like a bizarre audio sketchbook and not a band in your computer, you can get some really unique grooves out of it, especially in genres where oddness is a feature not a bug (glitch hop, vaporwave, synthwave, etc). I did one take for a lo-fi beat tape and most non-musician friends legit thought the guitar lines were real—not perfect, but passable among lo-fi crowd.
I’d steer clear of it for anything orchestral or intricate (like prog/jazz/anything with long solos or odd time sigs, as you noticed), but sometimes the randomness can spark better ideas than staring at a blank Ableton project. TL;DR—don’t expect realism without work, ditch vocals unless you want AI word salad, and cherry-pick the weird gems it coughs up. Using Udio as a wacky muse instead of an actual session player is way less frustrating than fighting it to sound human. Honestly, sometimes it’s more fun that way.