Udio: How to Make a Song With AI and How It Differs from Suno

Section 01What Udio is and what happened to it

Udio is a service that makes an entire song: music, vocals, and lyrics. It launched in April 2024, built by people who came from Google DeepMind. For the first few months Udio and Suno ran neck and neck, and plenty of musicians thought Udio sounded more natural: the vocals felt less robotic, and the guitars and piano sounded closer to the real thing.

What Udio can do today:

• A song from a description. You give a topic and a genre, and Udio writes the lyrics and the music.
• A song from your lyrics. You paste finished verses and a chorus, and Udio sings them.
• Extend. Adds an intro, a new verse, or an ending. Up to 10 parts in one song.
• Remix. Reimagines a finished song in another genre or mood.
• Edit a section. You select a stretch of the song and rewrite the music or the words in it. This is a paid feature.
• Styles. You give one or two songs as a sound reference, and Udio makes a new one in a similar style. You can blend two styles.
• Voices. You pick a voice from Udio's library or from one of your earlier songs. You can't upload your own real voice.
• Sessions. A timeline editor that makes it easy to build a long song from parts.

Udio runs in the browser on desktop and mobile, and there's an iPhone app. The interface is in English.

What happened at the end of 2025

In 2024 the major labels sued Udio and Suno: the AI models had been trained on their music without permission. On October 29, 2025, Udio reached a deal with Universal Music Group, and on November 19 of the same year, with Warner Music Group. The labels didn't buy Udio. These are licensing agreements: Udio will train new models on licensed music and work with artists who opt in.

The plan is a new platform where you'll be able to make remixes, covers, and songs in the voices and styles of participating artists. Until it launches, Udio runs under transitional terms, and they changed the service a lot. As of November 4, 2026, the new platform hasn't launched: the latest post on Udio's official blog is dated November 19, 2025, and the help center still describes the transitional mode. The available models are v1, v1.5, and v1.5 Allegro.

Section 02Can you download a song from Udio and use it for work

This is the first question to ask before you sign up. Short answer: no, and no.

Udio's help center article on the Universal partnership says plainly that downloading audio, video, and individual stems is disabled. That happened on October 30, 2025, the day after the deal. There's no Download button in the interface on any plan, including the $30 Pro.

The terms of service prohibit more than downloads. I read them in full. Here's the gist in plain words:

What's still allowed: listening to songs on the site and sharing them with a link like udio.com/songs/… Anyone can open that link, even without a Udio account. Udio's help center confirms this separately.

That leads to a simple conclusion for everyone who sells services, courses, and consulting. You can't make music in Udio for Reels, an ad, a podcast, a webinar, or a chatbot: even if you find a workaround to save the file, you'll break the terms, and your account can be closed. The internet is full of Udio "downloaders". Don't use them for work content: legally, it's the same as publishing something the terms prohibit.

Section 03Udio free plan and pricing

Udio runs on credits. According to its help center, 1 credit is roughly 30 seconds of a track. Each run gives you two versions at once, so a short 32-second run costs 2 credits. A two-minute song costs more, roughly in proportion to its length. Credits are spent only on creating new tracks.

Unused credits don't roll over to the next month. You can buy more separately: 100 credits for $3, 1,000 credits for $25. There's a student discount and a Standard trial: it opens up Standard features, but your limit stays at the free 10 credits a day. Prices and limits were checked on udio.com/pricing on November 4, 2026; sales tax may be added at checkout.

To make credits less abstract, here's the math. The free 10 credits a day cover five short 32-second runs, which means ten sketches. Or one or two full songs with their versions. Standard's 2,400 credits come to about 1,200 short runs a month; with two-minute songs, proportionally fewer.

Which plan to pick:

• You want to find out if this is your thing. Free. Three full songs a day is enough to get a feel for the service in a week.
• You write songs for yourself and the people you love on a regular basis. Standard. The main thing it adds is section editing: you can rewrite one weak line without regenerating the whole song.
• Pro is for people who spend hours in Udio and run dozens of versions in parallel. For work content it changes nothing: there are no commercial rights and no downloads on Pro either.

A tip that saves money: don't pay for a year upfront. Udio has promised a new platform, and the rules there could change in any direction. Paying monthly keeps your options open.

Section 04Availability and payment

Udio is available in the US: the site works in any modern browser on desktop and mobile, and there's an app for iPhone. Signing up takes a minute.

Section 05Your first song in Udio in 5 minutes

Start with the simplest mode: a song description, no lyrics of your own. In a couple of minutes you'll hear what Udio is capable of.

Section 06Your own lyrics and tags

When Udio writes the lyrics itself, the result is sweet, but it's about everything and nobody. A song for your mom or a friend sounds real when it has your words, names, and details. That's what Custom mode is for.

The tags that work most often:

Udio's own help center is honest about it: tags are hints, and the model makes the call. Sometimes the chorus starts a line early or the break comes out shorter. That's normal; fix it with another run or a section edit.

How much text to paste. A two-minute track fits roughly a verse, a chorus, a second verse, and a chorus. Paste three verses plus a bridge, and Udio will either cram them together or cut the song off halfway. Split long lyrics into parts and add them with Extend – more on that in Section 09.

Section 07How to write a prompt for Udio

The description (prompt) controls the sound: genre, mood, tempo, instruments, the character of the voice. A good Udio prompt follows a formula:

Before you write, answer five questions from Udio's help center: what mood (happy, dreamy, dark, nostalgic), what genre, what tempo, what instruments, what story. Your answers are your prompt.

Three more tricks that work:

• Repetition adds weight. If you want lots of piano, write piano twice.
• An artist's style. You can add "in the style of …" with an artist's name. Udio won't copy the voice, but it will pick up the general musical feel.
• Manual mode for precision. By default Udio expands your description with genre tags. Manual mode turns that off. If you also fix the seed in Advanced Settings, the same prompt with the same settings gives the same result. Handy when you want to change one detail at a time and hear the difference.

Ten ready-made descriptions for different occasions:

Section 08Claude writes the lyrics and the prompt for Udio

The hardest part of a song is the lyrics. Rhymes, meter, lines that sit on the music, one idea in the chorus. That's easy to hand to Claude: you tell it who the song is for and what it's about, and it returns tagged lyrics plus a style prompt. You can open Claude at claude.ai; the free plan is enough for this.

Here's the prompt I give Claude. Copy it and change whatever is in square brackets:

I ran this prompt myself. Below is the full answer, unedited:

What works here: the number is written as a word, the chorus has one idea and short lines, and the personal details keep the song alive. What I'd fix before running it: in the chorus, "go" and "call" don't rhyme, and "like" and "night" only half-rhyme, so the chorus sounds looser than the verses. Ask Claude: "Make line 3 of the chorus rhyme with line 1, keep it at 7 syllables." That's the way to work: the first draft of lyrics almost always needs one or two fixes.

Next: paste the style description into the Prompt field and the lyrics into Custom, set the length to 2 minutes, and click Create.

Section 09How to polish a song in Udio

The first result is rarely perfect. Udio's strength is its editing tools: you can refine a song piece by piece without starting over.

Extend

Click Extend next to the song title. The original prompt fills in automatically, and you can adjust it. Then choose where to add a piece: at the start or the end, an intro or an outro, or crop part of the original and continue from that point (Crop & Extend). One song can have up to 10 parts. For an instrumental break, leave the lyrics field empty. This is also the easiest way to add long lyrics: verse by verse.

Remix

Takes a finished song and reimagines it. Useful when you like the melody and dislike the arrangement: the same song as jazz, rock, or acoustic.

Edit

Available on paid plans and in the trial. Open the song in your Library, click Edit, and select a section. There are two modes: Replace Section changes the music and mood in that stretch, Edit Lyrics changes the words. A lifesaver when the whole song works and one line is sung unclearly.

Trim

Cuts extra bits at the start or the end. Handy if Udio added a long intro or dragged out the ending.

Styles

Instead of describing the sound in words, you show it. The reference can be your own Udio song, someone else's Udio song (if the author allows it), an uploaded audio file, or a style from Udio's library. You can blend two styles and set the balance. Blending and the style library work only on desktop, and blending is for subscribers. An important caveat: upload only what you have the rights to. Your own guitar recording – fine. Someone else's radio hit – no.

Voices

You can take a voice from Udio's library or from one of your earlier Udio songs. You can't upload your own real voice. On the free plan, voices are available in Playground mode: there Udio pairs a random voice with a random style, and you can't set exact lyrics. Full voice control in Create mode is for subscribers. The iPhone app doesn't have voices yet; they're browser-only.

Sessions

A timeline editor. You see the whole song at once, and it's easy to extend and rearrange parts. Useful when a song is built from five or six pieces.

Section 10Lyrics tips

Udio sings what you give it, but the model has its habits. A few rules make the vocals cleaner:

• Numbers as words. "Thirty-five" instead of "35", otherwise the model may read the digits any which way.
• Short lines. 6–9 syllables per line sit on the music more evenly than long sentences.
• Swap awkward words. If Udio stumbles on a word or stresses the wrong syllable, find a synonym. It's faster than regenerating the song ten times. If the line works overall and one word slipped, fix it with Edit on a paid plan.
• Genre names in the style prompt. Keep genres, instruments, and mood in the Prompt field and the story in the lyrics. Mixing them up confuses the model.
• Foreign words are fine. Udio pronounces "hola" or "gracias" cleanly even in the middle of English lyrics.

If the vocals are what matter most to you, compare Udio and Suno on the exact same lyrics. I covered how Suno handles pronunciation in the Suno guide.

Section 11Udio vs Suno: the differences

This comparison is based on both services' official pages: Udio checked on November 4, 2026, Suno on October 28, 2026.

What this means in practice:

• Music for Reels, ads, a podcast, a webinar, a course, a chatbot. Suno on a paid plan only. I showed how to build videos around content like this in the guide on AI for Reels.
• A song for loved ones, a joke anthem for friends, sound experiments. Either one works. People love Udio for its detailed sound and flexible piece-by-piece editing, and Suno for getting a whole song from one run that you can keep.
• You need the song file on your own device. Suno only.

If you're unsure, make the same song in both services on the free plans. Same prompt, same lyrics. In one evening you'll hear whose sound is closer to yours.

Section 12Where Udio helps and where it doesn't

Udio is a toy for personal use and a workshop for finding a sound. Here's where it's genuinely useful if you sell services, courses, and consulting, and where to leave it alone.

Where it helps

• A gift for loved ones. A song for your mom's birthday, a friend's wedding, a child's graduation. You send a link, and they listen without signing up. Personal, non-commercial use is exactly what the terms allow.
• Finding a sound before you commission music. You want a podcast jingle but don't know the genre. Run five 32-second versions in Udio and hear for yourself what you like. Then describe that sound in words and make the jingle in Suno on a paid plan or hire a musician. The Udio files themselves go nowhere and are used nowhere.
• A song for your team. A joke anthem for an internal celebration that you play together from a link. No posting on social media and no ads.
• Practice writing lyrics. Udio teaches you well how lines sit on music. That skill carries over to Suno.

Where it doesn't

• Background music for Reels, Stories, YouTube.
• Music for an ad or a landing page.
• An intro for a podcast, a webinar, or a course video.
• A song as a gift to a client as part of your service or a promotion.
• Releasing on streaming services.

All of that is commercial use or publishing on platforms Udio's terms explicitly prohibit. For those tasks: Suno on a paid plan; for voiceover, ElevenLabs; for video with your avatar, HeyGen.

Section 13If something goes wrong

Section 14The whole path in a minute