Audio & Music
Create music, sound effects, and audio with AI
Music and audio generation models for creative production
Audio-generation models cover everything that isn't speech or transcription: music, sound effects, ambience, and full songs with vocals. Reach for one when you need royalty-free background music for a video, sound effects for a game or app, or a full song with vocals for a prototype.
5 models available
MusicGen
Meta's music generation model. Generate up to 1 minute of music from text descriptions.
Bark
Suno's text-to-audio model. Generates realistic speech, music, and sound effects.
MAGNeT
MAGNeT is Meta's masked, non-autoregressive audio generator. Instead of predicting tokens left to right it fills masked audio tokens in parallel over a few decoding steps, so generation is faster than autoregressive MusicGen at similar quality. This Replicate packaging exposes the text-to-music and text-to-sound variants.
Stable Audio Open 1.0
Stability AI's Stable Audio Open generates short audio from text prompts, tuned for sound effects, drum loops, instrument riffs and production elements rather than full songs. Open weights, latent diffusion over a 44.1kHz audio autoencoder, with a configurable seconds_total up to about 47 seconds.
Udio V1.5
AI music generation with studio-quality output. Generate full songs with vocals, instruments, and production.
Top audio & music picks
Hand-picked across four common criteria — resolved against the live catalog so the picks track price and performance changes.
Meta's music generation model. Generate up to 1 minute of music from text descriptions.
Learn moreSuno's text-to-audio model. Generates realistic speech, music, and sound effects.
Learn moreMeta's music generation model. Generate up to 1 minute of music from text descriptions.
Learn moreSuno's text-to-audio model. Generates realistic speech, music, and sound effects.
Learn morePricing models vary more than in other categories. Music-from-prompt services (Suno, Udio, Riffusion) typically bill per-generation regardless of clip length up to their built-in cap. Sound-effect generators (AudioGen, ElevenLabs Sound Effects) bill per-second of output. Open-weights models running on shared GPUs are billed by compute time. Expect anywhere from one cent for a short effect to a euro for a fully arranged song.
The trade-off is musicality versus controllability. Flagships like Suno V4 and Udio produce surprisingly polished songs with verses, choruses, and instrumental breaks — but they decide most of the arrangement for you. Open-weights models (MusicGen, Stable Audio Open) give you finer control over genre, BPM, key, and instrumentation, but the output is shorter and less coherent. For background music in a video, the flagships usually win on time-to-final. For sound design that has to match a specific cue, open-weights with conditioning is the way.
Watch out for vocal cloning: some music models will happily generate vocals in a specific singer's style if you prompt them, which is a copyright and platform-policy minefield. Stick to original styles or use the safety-filtered tiers.
Licensing in this category is the most heterogeneous: some providers grant full commercial rights, some restrict to personal use, and a few are still in research-preview limbo. Always read the license before shipping output in a paid channel.
Top picks above cover the song-quality flagship, the cheapest sound-effect generator, the longest-clip option, and the fastest realtime model.
Popular use cases
Common patterns built with audio & music on Railwail.
Related comparisons
Side-by-side reviews of the most-compared models in this category.
Frequently asked questions
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