Google Flow Music

(flowmusic.app)

79 points | by hmokiguess 3 hours ago

24 comments

  • jmull3n 1 minute ago
    It can generate something well produced, but it's really bad at applying taste or direction in the way a human does.

    The workflow feels wrong. it should be closer to a DAW with chat, where the model outputs stems, samples and arrangement parts instead of one finished track. Then you could target a specific sound, section or idea and actually develop it.

  • adrianwaj 1 hour ago
    Why not call it Slopify? Humans are the new vinyl.

    https://flippa.com/12100071 - I was wondering why SmashHaus was for sale. (no affiliation) Peak value. It's only downhill from here for outsourced music.

  • johanneskanybal 36 minutes ago
    "Let's go surfing dude, we'll make some vibes!" This is like if someone lobotomized your grand dad and then created an tik tok account for him.
  • TheAceOfHearts 16 minutes ago
    It's good, I have this song I generated last year with Suno which stuck with me and I just tried having Flow generate a variant and it was acceptable. Sometimes the lyrics get modified for no reason. It would be better if you could control emphasis by specifying tags or something along those lines, but it seems fun to play around. If there was an intermediate step where a symbolic or partial processing of your input was shown for tweaking, it would be immensely powerful.

    One of the key issues that I encountered after a few song generations is that it feels very rushed, like it's constrained to this 3 minute limit per song so it forces every section of the song to conform to a very specific structure. I tried increasing the limit to 4 minutes but it still gave me 3 minute songs.

    Honestly, I feel like this product is showing up a bit late to the party and it's not really feeling particularly innovative. There's nothing egregiously bad about it, but it doesn't seem to add anything new or special that I could notice.

    I don't have a microphone hooked up so I can't try the voice interface, but it would be really fun if you could sing to it in order to iteratively compose a song. It could clean up your voice a bit and add music. Or being able to hum out a beat which it converts into a track which you slowly build up. Is anyone able to try if those capabilities are possible with the existing product?

    Overall, I'm not sure if a chat interface is the best way to produce a song. It feels very restrictive to have full songs as the primary iteration mechanism. In a text file and in code you can inspect or modify different sections or components very easily. I think a more human-focused tool would provide an on-ramp towards full music production, where you can focus on the parts that you care about and enjoy, while the AI tool fills the other parts with sausage. Right now you can chat with the tool but it appears to be quite limited in the kind of changes that it can make.

  • wxw 1 hour ago
    I asked it to make lofi cafe music and it just made a static web-page. When I asked why there wasn't any music, it said:

    > My bad—I forgot to hook up the sound system.

    And then it started playing jazz, which I'm not mad about. Nice to see Google trying fun stuff.

  • unicorn_cowboy 43 minutes ago
    This is their recent acquisition (producer.ai) rebranded.

    Before the purchase, the quality of generations had been going down for a while (IMO; subjective and anecdotal). I tested multiple iterations of their chat interface and was never thrilled with its ability to actually understand or adhere to prompts. I had liked their previous (Suno/Udio-like) iteration (Riffusion).

    Curious to hear how it performs for people now and whether anything has improved.

  • genewitch 25 minutes ago
    it can't remix. even comfyui can remix on my desktop. I've used udio, suno, comfyui with the music generation models, and one other site that i can't remember the name of since it was through a friend.

    They all kinda suck, you do have to run generation many times unless you're very lucky.

    I and my friend wrote 10 albums between 1997 and 2007. we went solo for geographical regions, and i stopped writing music altogether in 2017 or so, only doing arrangements, mashups, mastering.

    I can't use this google product to make a song. source for credentials is my youtube, soundclick, and soundcloud accounts, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXro-e0e7aA

    and now i don't even know if i ever want to get back into music, because i can rapidly generate a "good enough for the moment" track, like when the south korean president tried to coup: https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-a... Oh by the way the lyrics are in lojban except for "... and the people were pissed"

    the oldest stuff on those three sites i mentioned is all hand written by me over the years.

  • gtirloni 1 hour ago
    This website looks so terrible that I can't tell if it's really owned by Google or a scam.
    • breezybottom 1 minute ago
      It's still better than NotebookLM. Google is really bad at following their own design guidelines.
    • verst 46 minutes ago
      Agreed - I have been checking to verify whether this truly is a Google service or just something that links out to generic Google ToS and Support pages. It looks suspicious.
    • giancarlostoro 44 minutes ago
      Yeah, I had to do a triple take.
    • fg137 1 hour ago
      And its animation is terribly buggy on mobile.
  • florilegiumson 38 minutes ago
    AI music generators are not my cup of tea, but it was fun trying to get it to create this fever dream machine. https://www.flowmusic.app/space/2dc0e63f-a27c-4f4f-91c9-60e8...

    I especially love the glitchy ui sounds, although I suspect it's hardly intentional.

  • MrZander 1 hour ago
    Really bad at prompt adherence. Was trying to get it to compose a solo old time banjo piece. Couldn't get it to stop adding in backing instrumentals at all and it sounded too much like bluegrass style.

    "solo banjo instrumental, strictly no other instruments" ... ten seconds later: drums, a fiddle, and a guitar join in.

  • deferredgrant 2 hours ago
    I can see the appeal if this ends up being good at iteration rather than just first-pass generation. A lot of AI music products look impressive for five minutes, but the real test is whether they help someone get closer to a specific thing they actually wanted to make.
  • pavel_lishin 2 hours ago
    Given how much Google lives to mash their offerings together, and then sunset them, I live in fear of them killing Google Youtube Music (or whatever it's called), in favor of combining functionality with this, and having my music cycle between my actual library, and bespoke AI-generated stuff.
  • curvaturearth 9 minutes ago
    This is the type of thing that really doesn't interest me. Algorithmic junk that sounds "good", similar to the kind of writing an LLM generates. Sure you can do it, but the main use cases are AI Slop (IMO). Slopify is a great name
  • minikomi 52 minutes ago
    The descriptions generated from the prompts are almost always great, but the generated music is always terrible. The sound pallete seems so limited.
  • throwatdem12311 1 hour ago
    Tried to prompt some instrumental progressive metal with keyboard and guitar unison solos and some back and forth call and reply riffing and eventually it just kinda forgot that there was supposed to even be keyboards in the song. Basically slop knockoff of Liquid Tension Experiment.

    The sound of the guitar is good but the keyboard sounded realy awful, just like a Casio toy keyboard pretending to be a piano. Like truely awful sounding, which is when I prompted the AI to try to fix the tone and then it basically just removed it.

    The drums were also waaaaay too prominent so I asked it make them a bit more subdued in the mix and it just ended up slowing down everything to the point it just kinda sounded like generic radio alt-rock instead.

    But basically once the keyboards were forgotten no amount of prompting could “convince” it to bring them back.

    I tried Suno a few months ago out of morbid curiosity and it was waaaay better than this. Actually got something that made my musician friends actually kinda nervous.

  • dabinat 3 hours ago
    I’m a little confused about the pricing packages. In what scenario would being able to create 600 songs a month (20/day) be too few?

    I could understand if this was an API that people built products around, but it seems to be geared directly at consumers.

    • numpad0 47 minutes ago
      I don't know anything about these AI tools, but it seems to me like, the yield rates of all these AI media generators are exactly in the range of that of lootbox games. Kids "pull" it like slot machines for set prompt, keeping no more than 1% of outputs. The rest is just thrown away, only potentially useful as negative data. So 600 per month total is probably like just couples per month usable.
    • smallerfish 2 hours ago
      If it's anything like suno, it probably takes you 30 to 40 attempts to dial in what you were looking for. (And don't get me wrong, the results can be great with suno - there's just a lot of trial and error, and dice rolling.)
    • 999900000999 1 hour ago
      Eminem allegedly has hundreds of songs in the vault.

      Odds are for every 200 ai songs you generate , 2 or 3 are decent.

      Anyway. UMG will probably force you to sign over training rights in future record deals.

      The models still can't rap. Sounds like if you asked someone who didn't know what rap was to read a script

  • zackify 1 hour ago
    This thing is insane i already made multiple songs in english and spanish, different genres
    • giancarlostoro 59 minutes ago
      This is how I use Suno, guess I'll give this a fair try.
  • DiabloD3 1 hour ago
    Why did Google bother?

    They're a music store, they sell music, both to own, but also renting their vast library out.

    Google should learn not to shit where they eat.

    • tredre3 1 hour ago
      Welcome to 2026's reality, most new music is already AI-generated. I don't like it, but it is what it is. YT Music is already full of AI slop, those tools aren't changing that.

      If anything it gives Google control of the entire production->sale->delivery process.

      I'm honestly not seeing a downside for Google here, can you elaborate?

      • DiabloD3 1 hour ago
        I just keep reporting AI slop videos (incl music) on YT, and sometimes the videos or even entire channel vanish. I hope I'm contributing to this process to keep YT safe, but I'm just one guy, and they probably have a much bigger effort internally.

        The downside for Google is, ultimately, the death of the company. Nobody wants AI slop, and go out of their way to actively avoid it and punish companies that promote it. Google already is running a huge risk by pushing Gemini into every service, and permanently burning customers and users with it.

        Microsoft is already seeing the downside of trying to Copilot everything. Their software is now partly slop, shit randomly breaks, companies cancel Azure/Office subscriptions and move to on-prem, FOSS, etc. They've pumped their brakes quite a lot, but the damage may be too great to mitigate now.

        If Google wants to lose money in the long run, then by all means, please continue.

        • somewhatgoated 52 minutes ago
          The people in charge here don’t give a fuck about the long term. Reap as much profits for yourself as you can before everything inevitably collapses - that’s the prevailing current trend. Let the lizard brain take over and just feel good in the moment, why worry about the future.
          • DiabloD3 3 minutes ago
            Unfortunately, this is probably true for Google.

            Once you have that particular brand of cancer, its too late to save the company without drastic measures.

  • ryanwhitney 1 hour ago
    > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

    Nice

  • vendemiat 1 hour ago
    It requires age verification
  • ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago
  • philringsmuth 2 hours ago
    What I really hate about all of this, whether it’s music, images, video or anything else, is how much they all use the word “create.” As in, you can create the music you’ve always imagined.

    You. Are. Not. Creating. Anything.

    You are prompting. Then tweaking, changing, adjusting, etc. The tech is incredible, don’t get me wrong, but it’s advertised so blatantly as the user doing the creating.

    Use it as a creativity tool, but don’t get caught up in the false belief that what it spits out is something you created.

    Old man yells at cloud. Going back to my cave now.

    • thorum 1 hour ago
      The models are primitive right now, but we’re clearly heading toward “AI as sound synthesis, human as artist” - much like how producers currently use a DAW to assemble premade loops and sounds from Splice, but with the producer now able to prompt any sound, filter, or effect they can imagine into existence and then rearrange them into a song.

      See for example Suno Studio, which is not very good in my opinion, but shows the direction they’re going.

    • rdiddly 53 minutes ago
      It's worse than that: the creativity and originality I put in my prompts, it extinguishes, and instead churns out unoriginal formulaic crap. The crap sounds exquisite and realistic though.
    • xnx 2 hours ago
      Where do you draw the line? Do composers create?
      • cwillu 2 hours ago
        It is not necessary to draw a sharp line that clearly divides everything before saying “this is too far” about something that has, in fact, gone too far.
      • kibibu 1 hour ago
        Yes.

        Does the guy who tells the composer "write a song" create?

        No.

        The line is somewhere in the middle

      • _DeadFred_ 1 hour ago
        At what point of detail/complexity does my restaurant order transform me into the cook?
      • somekyle2 1 hour ago
        [dead]
    • gnopgnip 2 hours ago
      How does that work with using a camera to take photos?
      • philringsmuth 15 minutes ago
        I’m a photographer, I have almost a quarter million photos in my archives. When I take a photo, 90% of it is composition, during which I move around, analyze lighting, background, aperture, shutter speed, exposure and a whole lot of “what do I want to capture here?”

        The other 10% is editing, which for me involves minor color adjustments, highlights, shadows, cropping, etc. I make all the decisions.

        AI can generate an image based on a prompt, and that’s fine, but I would never, never claim to have created that output myself.

      • recursive 1 hour ago
        You press the button to capture the photo. As you note, a different verb is used. When I order take-out, I'm not "creating" it.
  • fortran77 1 hour ago
    I wanted it to make a "PAMS" or "JAM CReative" style radio jingle, like the radio jingles of 70s radio stations but for my website. It failed miserably
  • giancarlostoro 53 minutes ago
    Really not a fan of the "ChatGPT" style UI, did they even look at something like Suno at all? This is a little silly to me.

    The music sounds decent, I feel like its missing some things, to be fair Suno still doesn't know what a Puerto Rican guiro is. I assume a lot of these AI platforms will take many iterations.

    Things Suno needs to figure out and maybe Google now too, is how to let someone pick a specific voice, and get a rather unique voice, I've heard a few songs in Suno with similar voices to my own songs, and its kind of weird.

    I do love making the songs as a hobby, so not a big deal. All in all, AI music is really fun to toy with, especially blending genres together.

    One very noticeable difference against Suno is Google Flow Music lets you make Music Videos, which I have yet to test. I wonder if I can use my Suno songs to make music videos for them, not sure I'm vibing with Google's Music AI yet.

    Aside: Makes me chuckle a little, since "Flow Music" is a reggaeton catch phrase by Arcangel who would always say "Flow Music" even though it was always called "Flow Factory" he would call it Flow Music.

    Edit:

    There's some awkward factors Google will need to work out, while the instruments and voices sound nice and clear, the rythm feels weirdly off for some songs, its like the voices are not matching the genre mix, its also missing some nuances I've asked for, I assume it does not know what "wobble bass" means. Suno lets you describe nuanced specific sounds or instruments and uses them how you describe.

    I told it to have a dubstep breakdown in the middle, it keeps the artist singing / rapping, which is bizarre, that's not how a breakdown would be...

    Suno takes great care to make sure the voice always matches whatever is going on with the beat, including humming the beat / bass / brass / whatever instruments are being played.

    Glad Suno is going to have some real competition, I just hope Google doesn't kill Suno with its bigger wallet, would be a shame.

    Edit:

    Final verdict from me is, it feels like less polished than Suno in terms of music, but more features. Suno lacks music creation which still annoys me they let you make a lyric video that's one single orientation / resolution, you have zero control over it otherwise.

    There's a "workspace builder" which you prompt and it builds a web app that lets you create songs and what not, not sure what all the features of it is, but it is interesting as well.

    If they get this more on par with Suno, they might for the first time ever take money from me since I left the Android / Google platform many moons ago.