Exploring Suno 4.5+ Playlist Feature: Shaping Your AI Creations Feels More Like Gacha Than Ever

The recent addition of the Playlist feature in Suno 4.5+—which lets you “pick a playlist of your own songs to inspire your next creation” and promises that only your music will be used to shape the output—marks a significant evolution in the landscape of AI-powered music creation. This update empowers artists to anchor AI output more directly to their personal style and catalog, standing out from previous versions that relied primarily on prompt text and parameter tweaks.

However, this leap in customization comes with new creative and technical uncertainties, especially when crafting cover songs.

Previously, Suno’s Advanced Options (weirdness, style influence, and audio influence) allowed granular control over how much of an uploaded cover’s character would seep into the final track. You could—at least, in theory—predict how the AI would interpolate your reference material and balance unique generation with resemblance to the source.

Now, with the Playlist option, another layer of influence is introduced. When you upload a playlist during creating covers, there’s an unknown factor at play: aside from the explicit Advanced Options settings, how much is the AI drawing from the playlist versus the original cover file? The result is a blend whose recipe is more opaque, making it tough to anticipate exactly which musical elements—arrangement, timbre, melodic phrasing—will surface in your output.

Adding Persona to the mix makes this process even more unpredictable. Personas further bias the creative output (perhaps toward an artist archetype or genre), increasing the number of influences acting on your song. At this point, crafting a new track with Suno feels less like assembling components and more like spinning a gacha machine—you provide ingredients, but the exact flavor you’ll taste is up to chance.

As a user motivated by both technological exploration and the desire to maintain artistic authenticity, I find this shift fascinating but fraught. The Playlist function amplifies artistic expression, but at the cost of predictability. For those seeking tight control, this could be frustrating. Conversely, if your process thrives on surprise, it's never been a better time to experiment with Suno.

For creators, this means three things:

• Excitement and Surprise: There’s genuine magic in hearing your AI synthesizer spit out something that merges your own themes with new twists you couldn’t have imagined.
• Experimentation Over Precision: The process rewards open-mindedness and iterative trials more than script-like precision.
• Rethinking Control: The overlap between Playlist, Advanced Options, and Persona means that the edges of your creative control are more diffuse; sometimes the AI will latch onto the spirit you intended, sometimes it will surprise you with an unrelated flourish.

In the end, the gacha-like nature of AI music generation is both a challenge and a gift. Each session becomes a roll of the dice—sometimes you hit on genuine magic, other times, you're left wondering which levers to pull next. Whether this enhances or undermines the creative process depends on your approach to uncertainty in art.

As Suno 4.5+ continues to evolve, these changes reflect a broader truth about AI-assisted music-making: creativity is no longer just about what you put in, but also about how you learn to play and react to the AI’s unpredictable outputs. The Playlist feature marks a step towards more personal, but also more experimental and serendipitous, collaboration between artist and machine. For those willing to embrace the unpredictability, the journey is as interesting as the result.