On Making Music with the Machine
Details
- External ID
- 46416488
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- On Making Music with the Machine
- Website domain
- substack.com
- Launched
- Dec. 29, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2652671755725191
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Have been making music using ML/AI tools for about as long as I've been on HN. Had a recent comment section on HN here [1] and after that thought it might be worthwhile to write out about the journey in greater detail... from crude LSTM models, to hacking around with Jukebox, and now Suno.[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388822
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai music and audio creation
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- ai-generated music creation
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No This is an essay/blog post documenting the author's journey using machine learning models for music generation over the years rather than a software product to vibe-code.
What it would actually take: As an educational essay, there is no software product to reverse engineer. If referring to building an underlying generative music engine like Jukebox or Suno, it requires multi-modal diffusion or autoregressive audio models trained across petabytes of copyrighted music on GPU clusters with specialized DSP and ML audio engineering.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Udio, Traditional music creation (vocal chords, violin)
Concerns raised: Copyright ownership unclear - AI-generated music may not be copyrightable under US law, Spotify distribution of AI music creates legal/financial risk, Not genuine songwriting - lacks human authorship required by law, Output quality concerns - results described as 'slop' without significant curation effort
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 192 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #157 of 193 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 61 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Beats, a web-based drum machine · hn · 2026-01-18 · 160 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Procedural Music Workstation in the Browser · hn · 2026-03-06 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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- AI music and auto-charting and custom rhythm minigame sandbox · hn · 2025-12-04 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- 🎵 MusicArena - the arena for AI music-making 🎵 · yc · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Suno V6 · ph · 2026-09-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.