Detecting Suno or Udio music: method and tools
Suno and Udio are the two most widely used song generators. From a simple description (“a folk ballad about the sea, female voice”), they produce a complete track, with lyrics, vocals and arrangement. For a label, a festival or a radio station receiving dozens of submissions, the question becomes very concrete: was this track played, or generated?
What often gives Suno and Udio away
Recognisable formats
Generated tracks often follow typical formats: lengths around 2 to 4 minutes, short intros, very classic verse-chorus structures. This is obviously not proof, since many human songs follow the same pattern, but it is a first filter.
A characteristic sound
With practice, you recognise a sonic “colour”: slightly grainy highs, vocals very upfront, instruments that blend into one another, ever-present reverb. The latest versions have improved a lot, and this signature is less and less audible.
Lyrics that are sometimes inconsistent
Invented words, forced rhymes, sentences that make no sense, approximate pronunciation: this is still a frequent clue, especially in languages other than English.
What a detector measures
Detection models do not listen the way we do. They turn the sound into an image (a spectrogram) and look for the traces left by the way the generator builds the signal. In 2024, researchers published a dataset of about 97,000 tracks, real and generated by Suno and Udio, along with models trained on it. Our tool relies on these models, with two additions:
- a passage-by-passage analysis, every 2.5 seconds, to locate the suspicious parts;
- vocals / instrumental separation, to unmask hybrid tracks.
In our tests, Suno tracks scored between 55 and 98%, and human tracks between 0 and 10% (details on the Reliability page).
Limits to know
- New versions: each Suno or Udio update can change the traces left. A detector must be re-evaluated regularly.
- Retouched tracks: a track that was generated and then remixed, re-mastered or partly replayed becomes harder to detect.
- Other generators: a tool trained on Suno and Udio will be less good at spotting a very different generator.
The right method for a professional
- Run the tracks you receive through the detector for a first sort.
- For flagged tracks, listen carefully to the passages highlighted on the timeline.
- Ask the author for evidence of the creative process: DAW session, separate stems, studio video.
- Keep the PDF report as a record of the check you carried out.