Suno
The most recommended of 8 AI music generators
Turns prompts, lyrics or hummed melodies into polished full songs, letting non-musicians make music, though critics find the output generic and note audio artifacts and weak lyrics.
Turns prompts, lyrics or hummed melodies into polished full songs, letting non-musicians make music, though critics find the output generic and note audio artifacts and weak lyrics.
187 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 107
- criticize it
- 80
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 1 year
Median of the 6 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 107 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Polished, musical arrangements and vocals
“the arrangements and solos that Suno has generated from my uploaded pieces much more creative and even human than most”
Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “An AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping a Billboard Chart” “I find the arrangements and solos that Suno has generated from my uploaded pieces much more creative and even "human"”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping Billboard Chart. That Should Infuriate Us” “the model is very, very musical, and the resulting arrangements, melodies and instruments/voices are just great”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “I wrote lyrics about dev life and had Suno turn them into an 80s glam-metal song [video]” - Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “I wrote lyrics about dev life and had Suno turn them into an 80s glam-metal song [video]”
- Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “I wrote lyrics about dev life and had Suno turn them into an 80s glam-metal song [video]”
- Comment from 21 Dec 2025 in “Backing up Spotify”
Non-musicians can finish songs
“Signed a hobbyist human songwriter who has a hate and minor like for Suno as im not a good singer.”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “Suno v6 released for music creation” “lets individuals, who otherwise don't have the skill, to make catchy songs with silly lyrics”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It” “sometimes when I want to hear what my song COULD be if I were good at every one of those”
Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Ante, a coding agent in a single binary that runs offline” - Comment from 28 May 2026 in “YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos”
- Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)”
Builds songs from your melodies
“Suno is the ONLY one that you can reliably pass in a 20-30 second melody and get something reasonably interesting”
Comment from 10 Feb 2026 in “Ace-Step 1.5 prompt tips: how I get more controllable music output” “it's also fun to take stuff out of Ableton and run it through Suno, to get real vocals and such”
Comment from 5 May 2026 in “Show HN: Ableton Live MCP” “I hummed a melody that came to mind and it materialized it into a full band-backed song.”
Comment from 25 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: Does anyone just listen to their own AI music now?” - Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “An AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping a Billboard Chart”
Fun personalized and silly songs
“it came back with a K-pop-style anthem that had a super catchy melody and lyrics that made my wife and me laugh out loud”
Comment from 5 Jun 2026 in “What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI?” “we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it”
Comment from 29 May 2026 in “Please Use AI” “Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 on Hacker News - Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Sounds generic, nothing to say
“no matter how I change the genre, lyrics, etc. there's some underlying quality I can't quite name that my brain recognizes and quickly gets tired of”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do” “Suno generated music has a very unpleasant feeling of sounding like competent music with nothing to say.”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You” “suno produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator.”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do” - Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “Suno v6 released for music creation”
Audio artifacts and detuned sound
“It still has some weird things going on with high frequency artifacts and phase between left and right channels”
Comment from 16 Jul 2026 in “How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM” “Sound quality doesn't seem to have improved, especially the grand pianos still sound detuned.”
Comment from 9 Sep 2026 in “Suno rolls out v6 song making model, will pay royalties” “Sound quality is better than Suno (less compression/alias artefacts, more transparent)!”
Comment from 8 Nov 2025 in “Musci.io – Text-to-Music AI Generator (20-30 second generation time)” Struggles with new or niche genres
“Try getting Suno to write a song in a new genre. Even if you tell it EXACTLY what you want, and provide it with clear examples, it won't be able to do it.”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else” “Suno's incapable of making psytrance, which is mind-boggling as that is an intensely repetitive, machine-like genre”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do” Lyrics and editing are weak
“It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it's terrible with lyrics), plugging them in”
Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)” “the melody is usually pretty decent but the lyrics tended to be distractingly boring and cringe”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with AI [video]” “I’m not sure this kind of detailed editing can easily be done with such AI tools anytime soon.”
Comment from 14 Jan 2026 in “AI Generated Music Barred from Bandcamp” - Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “This is not the future”
Other AI music generators people recommend
The four most recommended other AI music generators, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SunoThis page | 107 | 80 | 57% | 12 | 1 yr6 owners | — |
| ElevenLabs Music | 10 | 10 | 50% | 1 | — | — |
| Google Flow Music | 9 | 26 | 26% | 1 | — | — |
| Lyria | 8 | 5 | 62% | 5 | — | — |
| ACE-Step 1.5 | 6 | 2 | 75% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 244 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the melody is usually pretty decent but the lyrics tended to be distractingly boring and cringe”
“Suno generated music has a very unpleasant feeling of sounding like competent music with nothing to say.”
“Signed a hobbyist human songwriter who has a hate and minor like for Suno as im not a good singer.”
“A music creation tool by people and for people who either don't understand music, or low-key hate it.”
“Sound quality doesn't seem to have improved, especially the grand pianos still sound detuned.”
“sometimes when I want to hear what my song COULD be if I were good at every one of those”
“It still has some weird things going on with high frequency artifacts and phase between left and right channels”
“This time I created a song with Suno that fits the clips and includes some funny anecdotes from our vacation.”
“I definitely come from the angle of appreciating the novelty and newness of sound from this generated music”
“Suno's incapable of making psytrance, which is mind-boggling as that is an intensely repetitive, machine-like genre”
“no matter how I change the genre, lyrics, etc. there's some underlying quality I can't quite name that my brain recognizes and quickly gets tired of”
“suno produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator.”
“it came back with a K-pop-style anthem that had a super catchy melody and lyrics that made my wife and me laugh out loud”
“Suno is why I bought a midi keyboard last December, and I'm experimenting with actual DAWs as well.”
“we had a blast last time with my five year old shouting nonsense at Suno and having it make some cool songs out of it”
“I'm not a musician so Suno is the only way I could actually produce and finish a song.”
“Listening to Suno produced version of my songs is way more satisfying then listening to other peoples music”
“it's also fun to take stuff out of Ableton and run it through Suno, to get real vocals and such”
“I could tell it things with little context, and it knew that I was asking for something modern with a dated term”
“lets individuals, who otherwise don't have the skill, to make catchy songs with silly lyrics”
“Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it?”
“Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like”
“I've generated a lot of what I think of as bangers with Suno but learned quickly that they have zero value to anyone else.”
“I'm excited that I have access to something I previously did not through the use of Suno and other tools.”
“Suno is the ONLY one that you can reliably pass in a 20-30 second melody and get something reasonably interesting”
“Try getting Suno to write a song in a new genre. Even if you tell it EXACTLY what you want, and provide it with clear examples, it won't be able to do it.”
“I’m not sure this kind of detailed editing can easily be done with such AI tools anytime soon.”
“Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track”
“This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the creative boilerplate”
“I've been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it's got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard”
“It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it's terrible with lyrics), plugging them in”
“it's amazing how convincingly it can crack specific Genres and churn out quality music”
“its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs”
“I hummed a melody that came to mind and it materialized it into a full band-backed song.”
“it immediately gets everything including harmonies, structure, melodies and lyrics, just amazing.”
“the model is very, very musical, and the resulting arrangements, melodies and instruments/voices are just great”
“the model generated a surprisingly polished track — full vocals, instrumentation, arrangement, and mix”
“I find the arrangements and solos that Suno has generated from my uploaded pieces much more creative and even "human"”
“the arrangements and solos that Suno has generated from my uploaded pieces much more creative and even human than most”
“Sound quality is better than Suno (less compression/alias artefacts, more transparent)!”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.