For years, we've been anticipating a time when you’d simply be able to tell a DAW what kind of track you want to make and then watch as it does all the work for you, and thanks to artificial intelligence, that time is now here. In fact, music production platform Amped Studio has just released an AI-assisted ‘Track Builders’, and it works pretty much as we’ve just described.
Everything is handled in a single window - choose a genre, tempo and track length and the software will do the rest. That said, the software doesn’t generate the parts in real-time. It works by trawling Amped Studio’s content library, finding suitable audio samples and arranging them, so it really is a builder rather than a creator.
What’s more, it remains to be seen how ‘intelligent’ the AI actually is. Will it always come up with a different track based on the same parameters, or will it turn to the same or similar sounds every time? And who ‘owns’ the music being made here?
It’s also worth saying that AI-powered track generation is predicated on the assumption that all that matters is the end result. For many of us, the enjoyment and satisfaction we get from music lies in the process of making it, not watching a computer do it.
If you need the basis of a track quickly, though, the Track Builder could be very useful. You can edit its output as you see fit by adding and removing parts or changing the arrangement, so you could easily see it as a tool for kickstarting projects rather than an end-to-end solution.
The Track Builders version of Amped Studio is currently in beta and free to use, so go and give it a try. It’ll be offered as a paid subscription from 19 June.
