Toontracks AI development?

[Nsurround]

It is obvious to me that toontracks developers must be working overtime to train AI on its current ‘sampled’ products an dmore. IMO, unfortunately the music production world is moving heavily into AI tools and or ‘AI generative music’ and the competition is really heating up to develop these types of products.  I assume if Toontracks still wants to stay in the game that this is where they are headed. They already have produced some of the best sampled drum kits on the market along with many midi grooves. So it stands to reason that the most recent release of EZdrummer 3 and its ‘bandmate’ feature is just the starting point.  With this in mind, I wonder where this will end up taking its current products such as Superior Drummer 3 in terms of updates or new features. The other choice would be to add completely new product(s) that will try and more fully realize this AI revolution (Superior Drummer 4 . . . . . ).  Again IMO, there is a big difference using AI in the context of it being a ‘tool’ rather than a self ‘generative’ crutch (aka Suno and others). It remains to be seen how Toontracks will play this out. This road also encompasses Toontracks other non-drum music production products but used the drummer ones as the example. Any Thoughts?

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[gearnerd]

The most likely area where they might be able to integrate AI is their midi tools. There is definitely room for improvement to paraphrase certain styles of playing to different chords and rhythm structures. It’s to rigid right now and breaks too easily. Also the controls in terms of the amount of notes and loudness work on a technical, rather than musical level.
I like Logic’s AI midi generation much better. Not necessarily the results but the concept and the controls it gives you using parameters like complexity, intensity and how it’s more resilient if you make structural changes.

For an AI future, I imagine, instead buying  midi packs you would buy a style or a “drummer”/“bassist”/“keyboard player” add-on.

[Nsurround]

“For an AI future, I imagine, instead buying  midi packs you would buy a style or a “drummer”/“bassist”/“keyboard player” add-on.”

Yeah, I think the ‘groove’ section could be done better and that the ‘style’ maybe the key. It seems to me that the ‘Bandmate’ feature in EZdrummer 3 is going in that direction. At least for songwriters who do not want to spend much time going thru a whole bunch of grooves via the current options. Seems to me that Superior Drummer 3 has the best sounding library of drum samples but it uses an interface of tweaking options that is somewhat cumbersome to mess with unless you are really into it. I think AI tools could improve that quite a bit and get you much faster to a satisfying end point. Since Toontracks has a infringement clause about using AI training on their products, I assume that the best defense is going on offense and creating the AI tools in their own eco system. Not sure that they can really stop others from AI training of their products unless they have some method of identification of samples and midi grooves etc. To me it would be extremely hard to do this at this point in AI development.

 

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