My honest review of Google's AI Music (Lyria 3): Incredible vocal stems, absolutely toxic moderation.
Hey everyone,
I’ve spent some time testing Google’s new music generation capabilities (powered by Lyria 3 inside Google Vids) on a 3-month free trial tier. I wanted to see how it stacked up against Suno, specifically as a tool to generate raw material for a serious audio engineering pipeline (UVR5 stem splitting -> Applio voice cloning -> Logic Pro).
I just burned through 10 of my 20 monthly full-song generations fighting an invisible, broken moderation filter, and I'm officially giving it the thumbs down. Here is my breakdown of the pros, the cons, and the absolute insanity of the safety filters.
The Pros (The Potential)
- Pristine Vocal Tracks: If you can actually get it to accept your lyrics, the vocal output is remarkably clean. Compared to Suno—which notoriously suffers from heavy, muddy data compression on vocals—Google gives you a sharp, high-fidelity vocal track.
- Perfect for Stem Splitting: Because the vocal clarity is so high, pulling the vocals out via UVR5 to feed into Applio for a voice clone works beautifully. It saves a massive amount of corrective EQ and spectral cleanup in post-production.
The Cons (The Friction)
- The Export Hoop: Google Vids is a video editor first. You cannot just export a WAV or MP3. You are forced to place the music on a canvas and export it as an MP4 video file, meaning you have to strip the audio out manually in DaVinci Resolve or Audacity afterward.
- Prompt Disconnect: The musical backing styles are incredibly literal and hard to steer compared to Suno's tag-cloud style prompting.
The Dealbreaker: The Insane Moderation & "Automated Substitution"
The safety filters act like a completely blind, blunt instrument that actively punishes creativity. When a lyric prompt triggers a hidden flag, the system doesn’t just give you an error message—it executes Automated Substitution. It silently wipes your custom text and generates corporate-safe, algorithmic filler lyrics while still charging you a generation credit.
Worse, it is completely volatile and arbitrary. I had a nostalgic, gritty prog-rock track with the lyric "smoking ciggies behind the trees" that sailed through perfectly under a "1960s pop" style prompt. But when I changed the style tag to "Pink Floyd style slow prog rock," the filter panicked and threw it out.
I tried to sanitize it by changing the line to "playing tag behind the trees"—and it still failed moderation. A hyper-literal safety script parsed "scraped knees" and "playing tag behind trees" in a moody rock context and flagged it as child endangerment.
Final Verdict
How can you fix a prompt when you don't even know what's broken? Without a targeted highlight of the flagged words or a human appeals process, creators are left blindly guessing in the dark while their monthly limits burn away.
If you want to use it strictly as an instrumental loop machine or a place to generate a generic vocal line to clone later, there is technical potential there. But if you spend hours writing your own lyrics and want a true creative collaborator, this digital nanny is not it. Back to Suno I go.
