Phase 6: Automatic Speech Recognition · ~75 minutes · Python

Music Generation — MusicGen, Stable Audio, Suno, and the Licensing Earthquake

2026 music generation: Suno v5 and Udio v4 dominate commercial; MusicGen, Stable Audio Open, and ACE-Step lead open-source. The technical problem is mostly solved. The legal problem (Warner Music $500M settlement, UMG settlement) reshaped the field in 2025-2026.

Hiring signal: Understanding of music generation — musicgen, stable audio, suno, and the licensing earthquake internals

What you will learn

Implement music generation — musicgen, stable audio, suno, and the licensing earthquake from scratch
Understand the math and intuition behind the algorithm
Use production libraries for the same task
Ship a reusable artifact

Introduction

Type: Build Languages: Python Prerequisites: Phase 6 · 02 (Spectrograms), Phase 4 · 10 (Diffusion Models) Time: ~75 minutes

The Problem

Text → a 30-second to 4-minute music clip, with lyrics, vocals, and structure. Three sub-problems:

Instrumental generation. Text like "lo-fi hip-hop drums with warm keys" → audio. MusicGen, Stable Audio, AudioLDM.
Song generation (with vocals + lyrics). "Country song about rainy Texas nights" → full song. Suno, Udio, YuE, ACE-Step.
Conditional / controllable. Extend an existing clip, regenerate a bridge, swap genre, stem-separate, or inpaint. Udio's inpainting + stem separation is the 2026 feature to match.

Unlock the full lesson

You've read the first 2 sections. The rest of this lesson covers The Concept, 2026 model map, The legal landscape (2025-2026), Build It, Use It, Pitfalls that still ship in 2026, Ship It, Exercises, Key Terms, Further Reading — plus a hands-on lab, quiz, and project artifact.

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