I covered generative AI for music a while ago – looking at Suno, Udio, and Google Labs’ MusicFX.

As a quick memory refresher, MusicFX is the one that gave me two songs about a robot learning about AI, both in Japanese (there are links in the original post).

Google Labs has another music tool, called MusicFX DJ, where you mix a list of prompts – styles, sounds (some a little unexpected), instruments, etc, into an instrumental track. It won’t allow specific artists in the prompts, and doesn’t do vocals, basically to stay away from any copyright infringement issues.

It also uses Google DeepMind’s AI ‘watermarking’ tech tool, SynthID, to flag that the track was created using AI.

This is the home screen, and you can see it has some interesting ideas on what could constitute an element of a music track.

You can change or delete any of them, as well as increase or decrease their relative strength in the resulting track. I thought it only did four at a time, and auto deleted the earlier ones. It doesn’t – they simply don’t show up unless you scroll (which when there wasn’t an apparent scroll bar, could be a bit of a challenge).

It also seems to take a little while to settle into a melody. When you’re doing the mix, the first few seconds after you hit the ‘play’ button can be a bit of a cacophony. I’ll leave it to you to play with the chaos element in the secondary mix bar.

You can share (and download) 60 seconds of the track, which begs the question, what can you do with that music?

The simple answer is more-or-less what you want, so long as it’s okay under the general Google Terms of Service and supplemental AI terms. Since anything in Google Labs is experimental, and likely to change at any moment, that means checking.

At the moment, the basic direction is that it’s pretty much yours, Google doesn’t claim it as theirs, but the whole ‘commercial use’ thing is unclear.

In all, I think it’s a useful tool for podcasters and social media video creators who might need a basic bit of music going in the background but it’s not going to replace Synthony any time soon.