Getting-started guide
An AI composer you steer with styles and settings rather than by describing a song.
Current prices: Free, from €15/mo · See all plans
Last reviewed 2026-09-15 · for AIVA
You pick a musical style from a list, set a few things like key, tempo and how long the track should be, then press create. AIVA hands back finished instrumental tracks you can play straight away. You keep the ones you like, adjust them in a built-in editor, and download the file.
AIVA is an AI composer for instrumental background music — soundtrack-style pieces for videos, games and podcasts, rather than songs with singing.
It works differently from the AI music tools that have had the most attention. Instead of describing a song in a sentence, you choose from a library of more than 250 preset styles and adjust musical settings. The one text box it does have takes a prompt (the message you type) that shapes the chord progression — the sequence of chords underneath a piece.
What comes back is editable. Tracks open in a built-in editor where you can mute parts, swap instruments and change individual notes, and they download as MIDI (the note-by-note score rather than a recording, which you can open in music software and rebuild). Among AI music tools that is unusual, and it is the main reason someone who reads music would pick AIVA.
AIVA has announced a newer engine called Lyra that does take a plain-language description of a whole piece. At the time of writing it is still being offered as a private beta you register for, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than something you can use on signing up.
Free to use after signing up at aiva.ai, and the free plan has no trial clock attached. What it limits is downloads — a small number each month, short tracks only, MP3 or MIDI files only. No plan currently allows a track longer than five and a half minutes. Whether every creation mode is open on the free plan is not spelled out in AIVA's plan comparison, so you may need to check that once you are signed in.
Who owns what you make depends on which plan you are on, and that is the first thing to settle. On the free plan AIVA holds the copyright, use is non-commercial only, and you must credit AIVA with a link to aiva.ai. Standard (a paid plan, plus VAT, cheaper billed annually than month to month) drops the credit requirement and allows monetised use on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram only — but the copyright still sits with AIVA. Only Pro, the higher paid tier, transfers the copyright to you and lifts the platform restriction. Read that split as the current position rather than a settled one: AIVA's licence agreement carries no effective date of its own and never says which plan maps to which licence, and the helpdesk article explaining the split is dated 2021 — so the live comparison table on AIVA's pricing page is the most current statement of what each plan allows, and it is the one to check before you rely on any of this.
Whether you need to pay is decided by what the music is for, not by how much you earn from it. A school project or a video for friends sits inside the free plan. Anything that promotes a business, or anything you want to hold the rights to, does not.
AIVA's privacy policy is dated March 11, 2019 and reads like a standard online-shop policy: cookies, analytics, Stripe for payments. It says nothing about the music you generate, and nothing about the audio or MIDI files you upload as an influence (a reference file you give AIVA so it can build something with similar characteristics). That silence, rather than anything the policy says, is what to plan around.
For ordinary use this is low-stakes: there is no personal information in a chord progression. The gap here is about your material, not about you.
Choose Create track then From a Style, pick a style from the library, and set the duration and the number of compositions you want. Press create and let it produce a batch rather than a single track.
Why this one: A style on AIVA already carries the instruments and the arrangement before you touch a single setting, so learning to shop the style list is the actual skill here — Suno has no style library to shop, only a sentence to write.
A cinematic progression in D minor that builds tension slowly, using 7th chords and resolving on a IV chord.
Why this one: This box lives inside Create track then From a Chord Progression, where AIVA calls it Text-to-Harmony. AIVA's own guidance is blunt about its reach: the prompt "only affects the harmony that will be used to generate your composition. It does not alter other musical elements, like the instruments or the arrangement." Mistaking this box for a song description is the most common misunderstanding of the tool, and AIVA also recommends writing in English for best results.
Tweak: The same field takes a named piece as a reference — try A progression in the style of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Open Styles then + Create to reach the Style Designer, upload an audio or MIDI file as an influence, and let it fill in that style's parameters. Then generate from the style it builds rather than from a preset.
Why this one: AIVA's manual describes an uploaded influence as auto-populating the style's parameters, so what carries over is a set of settings you can see and change afterwards — not the recording. Suno's cover feature works on the audio itself, which is why its results are finished and AIVA's are still adjustable.
Tweak: Upload a MIDI file rather than audio if you have one; MIDI carries the notes themselves rather than a recording of them.
Open a generated track in AIVA's editor, find the instrument layers, and mute or swap one, then play it back. The manual lists per-note editing, tempo changes and effects such as reverb on the same screen.
Why this one: AIVA keeps the layers and the individual notes separate all the way through to the editor, so a change you make edits the score rather than re-rolling the whole track.
Tweak: Mute every layer but one and listen to it alone; it is the quickest way to hear what a style is actually made of.
A simple, diatonic progression in dorian mode, slow and unhurried, with no key change.
Why this one: AIVA publishes preferences for this field that are unusual to find written down at all: name chords in Roman numerals rather than letters, avoid combining contradictory musical ideas in one prompt, and rephrase rather than retry when something misses. Udio publishes no conventions of this kind, so this is a platform you can learn to write for.
Want the full picture first? See the AIVA overview for pricing, the free tier and related tools.
