Photo Credit: Suno
Suno announces Studio 2.0, a browser-based creative platform that more closely resembles a comprehensive DAW, with MIDI support and more.
Creators looking to dabble in AI rejoice: Suno’s Studio 2.0 is here, and it’s the company’s most comprehensive attempt at a proper digital audio workstation (DAW) to date. Among its new features, Studio 2.0 boasts MIDI support, one of the most requested additions to the platform. Users can import, record, and edit MIDI directly on the timeline and design their own sounds with the new wavetable synth. There’s also browser support, advanced stem separation, and the ability to use and design your own plugins.
The Verge notes that while the MIDI support is a huge upgrade, Suno Studio doesn’t appear to support third-party plugins yet, so users are relegated to its proprietary built-in synth. This synth is a basic two-oscillator wavetable plugin with three envelopes and four LFOs. But the feature is more about using MIDI data as a prompt via Suno’s AI, rather than being able to swap in your favorite synth emulation.
Studio 2.0 also comes with a chatbot that users can prompt for lyrics or instruments. Crucially, this chatbot is tied to the current session and can pull in the musical context of your ongoing project. But its most interesting feature is the ability to create custom effects plugins, which are saved to your account so you can reuse them later.
While it’s packed with a lot more features than its previous iteration, Suno Studio 2.0 actually leaves less for the user to do themselves. Suno’s Henry Phipps held a demo, in which he can be seen cleaning up some notes before saying he should be asking the chatbot to do all that. He also leaves it up to the AI to decide on a vocal chain, rather than selecting the effects himself.
Suno says that Studio 2.0 was built using feedback from artists “at every level” over the past year. From that feedback, the company developed some major guidelines driving the platform’s changes, including the ability to simply “turn a knob and listen to the change in real time.” Text-based prompts for music creation work better when they’re built off of a tactile input from an instrument, MIDI keyboard, or vocal recording. Finally, the speed of the platform is crucial for a user’s ability to keep pace with their creativity.
“Perhaps our biggest takeaway from spending time with artists is their deep appreciation for the instruments and tools that have earned a place in their studios,” says Suno. “There is a long lineage of pre-AI music technology that many musicians (along with us folks building Studio) love and rely on. These modern music foundations, like guitars, drum machines, synths, effects, and step sequencers, are tried and true, and those familiar ways of interacting with sound ought to be available in the next generation of music software.”