What can BandLab's AI tools do for a song, and where do they stop?

Open BandLab, press SongStarter, pick Lofi, and in a few seconds you have three short compositions in the same mood. Pick one, open it in Studio as MIDI, swap the keys for a Rhodes, let AutoMix balance the drums against the bass, run a mastering preset over the bounce. Twenty minutes in, the project sounds like a record you would leave on in a café.

Then you look at the track list. There is a lane called Voice/Audio, and it is empty. No line of text anywhere in the project. No melody that a person could sing back. BandLab's AI has done a great deal to this song, and it has not touched the two things a listener remembers.

That is the whole shape of this page. BandLab ships a long list of AI tools and almost all of them are good at what they claim. They work on sound you already have or on MIDI they generate. None of them, on BandLab's own AI tools page at the time of writing, writes a lyric or sings one from text. Knowing exactly where that line falls saves you from paying for a membership to fix a problem it does not address.

If you are still choosing between songwriting apps in general (where to capture ideas, where to draft, what deserves money), read songwriting software and apps, sorted by job first. This page is for the reader who already has BandLab open and wants to know what its AI will and will not do for one particular song.

A note on who is talking: sunomarket is an independent site. It is not affiliated with BandLab or with Suno, and nothing here speaks for either company. Everything said about BandLab below was checked on BandLab's own product pages and help centre, and plans and limits there change often, so treat every number as "at the time of writing".

What BandLab actually calls AI

BandLab keeps a dedicated AI tools page. At the time of writing it lists ten: Voice Cleaner, AutoMix, FX Preset Generator, Palette, Splitter, Voice Changer, Audio-to-MIDI, SongStarter, Extend and Recompose. The help centre adds a few more that use AI without living on that page: Layer (the third Smart Tool beside Extend and Recompose), automated mastering presets with Reference Mastering, AI Video Generation and Lyric Video Generation.

Here is the honest table, one row per tool, with the tier as BandLab's help pages describe it.

Read the right-hand half of the table as a list of gaps. Two of them repeat in different words: nobody in this list writes the lyric, and nobody in this list produces a singer from nothing.

The idea stage: SongStarter and the Smart Tools

SongStarter is the tool most people mean when they search for BandLab AI, and it is a good one for what it is. The public page offers eleven genres plus a Random button: Acoustic Pop, Ambient, Drift Phonk, Hip Hop, House, Latin, Lofi, Pop, R&B, Retrowave and Trap. Each roll gives you three compositions; you can regenerate until one sticks, choose a vibe (Bright, Chill or Moody), and move the pitch and tempo. Then you open the result in Studio as editable MIDI and play it through any of BandLab's virtual instruments.

Two details matter more than the genre list.

First, rights. BandLab's help article on SongStarter says plainly that you will not own the rights to the generated track, while you can use it without paying fees or royalties. That is a usable licence for a loop under your demo. It is a different thing from owning a composition, and if you plan to register or sell the song, the part you wrote yourself is the part you can point to. This is not legal advice; for how ownership works with generated material, see who owns AI-generated music and our disclaimer.

Second, cost. BandLab's token page lists a newer SongStarter 2.0 among the tools that spend Tokens. All users get 15 Tokens a month, and one-time packs start at $8.99 for 2,000 Tokens at the time of writing. The classic SongStarter page still advertises unlimited ideas; check which version your app opens before you plan a session around it.

The Smart Tools take over once you have a MIDI region. Layer builds chords, bass and drums under a melody. Extend adds 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars. Recompose makes a variation of what is there. All three sit behind the membership. Used together they turn an eight-bar idea into something with a verse-sized and a chorus-sized section, which is exactly where most bedroom songs stall: the music is long enough to hold a song, and there is still nothing to sing over it.

The vocal stage: the tools that need you to sing first

This is the part of the list that gets misread most. Voice Cleaner, Voice Changer, AutoPitch and Audio-to-MIDI all sound like they "do vocals". Each one starts from a vocal you recorded.

• Voice Cleaner bundles a Noise Remover, DeReverb and AutoEQ. You can switch any of the three off, apply, and undo. It works on regions in one track at a time. A take recorded in a tiled kitchen gets noticeably drier; a take where you forgot the second verse stays a take where you forgot the second verse.
• Voice Changer turns your recorded voice into a different preset voice profile, with a deeper or higher pitch, and writes the result to a new track. BandLab pitches it for backing vocals, harmonies and layers built from your own voice. It is not a singer you can type to.
• AutoPitch is real-time pitch correction with genre effects. It assumes you are singing into it.
• Audio-to-MIDI turns a hummed melody into notes. Useful when the tune arrives before the words, and that is precisely the moment you discover there are no words.

So the vocal row of the project needs two things BandLab will not hand you: the text, and either your own voice or a separate tool that sings.

Mix, master and the stems you bring in

The back half of the chain is where BandLab is strongest and cheapest. AutoMix sets levels and panning to a genre you pick. The FX Preset Generator turns a sentence such as "dusty, close, slightly broken radio" into a chain of effects with a title and a description. Mastering gives every user four presets (Universal, Fire, Clarity, Tape), and BandLab's mastering FAQ promises unlimited WAV and MP3 downloads. The other four presets (Natural, Spatial, Cinematic, Punch) and the intensity control come with a membership; Mastering EQ and Reference Mastering are Max features. BandLab's own engineers repeat the rule every mastering engineer repeats: a master can make a good mix great and cannot fix a broken one.

Splitter is the odd one out because it is a practice and remix tool rather than a writing one. It separates vocals, drums, bass and others for free; guitar separation needs the membership. You can loop, change key and speed, then send the stems into Studio as audio or as MIDI. If what you actually want is to rework an existing track, the AI song remixer guide covers that job and its legal edges; BandLab's own music ownership page says remixes need permission from the original rights holder before you distribute them.

Where the tools stop, in one sentence each

Put the whole list against an empty project and ask what you still have to bring.

• The words. No tool on BandLab's AI page writes a lyric. The one feature with "Lyric" in its name, Lyric Video Generation, extracts lyrics from a track that already contains them; the help centre warns that running it on a track without lyrics still spends the token and produces nothing.
• A sung melody from text. Voice Changer and AutoPitch transform a voice. Neither creates one.
• Song structure as language. Extend can make the arrangement longer. Deciding that bar 17 is where the chorus lands, and what the chorus says, is still on you.
• A hook. SongStarter's three compositions are instrumental ideas. A title line that people repeat in the car is a text problem before it is a music problem.

None of that is a criticism of BandLab. It is a production environment with a social network attached, and its AI is aimed at production. The mistake is buying a Pro plan expecting it to finish the song for you, and then finding the empty Voice/Audio lane again.

Filling the gap: two routes, depending on who sings

Route 1: you sing it yourself in BandLab

You need a lyric that fits the loop you already have. This is where our AI song generator fits, and only here: you fill in a short form and it returns a song title and a full lyric with section tags. It does not make audio, ever, and it does not plug into BandLab. You read the lyric off the screen and sing it.

A form brief for a Lofi SongStarter idea might look like this, using the form's real fields:

POV        first
language   en
structure  classic
hook       title-line
vocal      female
emotion    longing
age        18-24
theme      the last bus home after a late shift; it passes the flat
           she used to share, the kitchen light is on, and she
           decides not to get off or text him

What comes back is a title and a whole lyric, every section of the chosen structure under its own tag. Here is a short illustrative excerpt in the same format, written for this page to show the layout:

[Verse 1]
Last bus, back row, the heater's dead
Ticket folded, phone face down instead
Your street comes up at ten past one
The kitchen light still on

[Chorus]
I don't get off at Alder Road
I let the doors close, let it go
Somebody's home on Alder Road
And it doesn't have to be me

When you sing it yourself, the tags are just a map: BandLab does not read them, and you can delete them once you know where each section starts. Record a scratch take over the SongStarter loop, run Voice Cleaner on it, and if your pitch wanders, AutoPitch is already in the app.

Route 2: nobody in the room is going to sing

Then BandLab cannot finish this song on its own, and it is better to say so than to pretend. You need a tool that turns text into a sung vocal, and the one our whole site is built around is Suno, which is a separate company we do not resell or speak for. In that workflow the tagged lyric goes into Suno's Lyrics field, the style goes into the style prompt, and the section tags start doing real work. Our guide to song structure in Suno shows how those tags steer the arrangement, and turning lyrics into a song walks through the whole hand-off.

You can bring the finished audio back into BandLab afterwards: split it, rebalance it, master it. Before you release anything built that way, read the terms of the tool that made the audio for your plan, because the rights there are set by that company, not by BandLab and not by us. Our own position is in the disclaimer: commercial use of the lyric is allowed, we claim no authorship over it, and the output is non-exclusive, so another user can receive similar lines.

If you are on a Mac and weighing BandLab against what Apple ships, what the AI tools in Logic Pro and GarageBand actually play for you runs the same test on that side: generous with instruments and arrangement, silent on words.

What it costs, at the time of writing

BandLab's membership FAQ lists two tiers. Pro starts with a 3-day free trial and renews at $14.99 a month, or $99 for the first year and $149 a year after. Max is $199 for the first year and $299 after on annual billing, with the monthly option marked as coming soon. Max adds Mastering EQ, Reference Mastering, Retune, an AI Harmonizer and $50 a month in Boost credits for promotion. Separately, every account receives 15 Tokens a month for the token-powered tools.

Two things to read in that table. The products barely overlap, so the question is never "which one" but "which gap am I filling". And neither side gives the words away: a new sunomarket account starts with zero credits, there is no free trial of the lyric generator, and the free part of the site is the style catalogue and the guides. Plans are on the pricing page.

Who should use what

• You make beats and never write words. BandLab's free tier plus SongStarter, Splitter and four mastering presets is a real toolkit at no cost. You may never need a lyric tool.
• You sing but stall on the page. Keep BandLab for recording and cleanup, and get the lyric from somewhere that writes lyrics. Voice Cleaner on Pro is worth it once you are recording often in a noisy room.
• You want a finished song with vocals and you do not sing. BandLab is the last mile, not the first. The lyric and the sung vocal come from other tools; BandLab can master and polish what they produce.
• You remix other people's tracks. Splitter is free and good. The legal question is not a BandLab setting; read the ownership page before you upload anything you did not write.

A first session that ends with a sung demo

1. In BandLab, roll SongStarter in one genre until one of the three compositions makes you want to hum. Save it as a project.
2. Use Extend or simply duplicate regions until you have about sixteen bars for a verse and eight for a chorus. Write down the tempo and the key from the settings.
3. Hum over the loop for two minutes and record it. If you are a member, Audio-to-MIDI turns that hum into notes you can keep.
4. Open the song generator, set structure to classic, hook to title-line, pick the emotion the loop actually has, and put one specific scene into the theme field: a place, an hour, an object. Generate.
5. Sing the verse over your hummed melody. Where a line has too many syllables, cut words, not notes.
6. Clean the take, run AutoMix, master with Tape or Clarity, and listen in the car. Whatever line you are still singing the next morning is your title.