How to Score a Short Film With AIVA and Your DAW
AI-generated music rarely hits a cut. This is a working method for using AIVA to produce stems, then reshaping them in a DAW so the…
AI music composer built for film scores, game soundtracks and royalty-free cues
AIVA is an AI music composer from Aiva Technologies (Luxembourg) that generates orchestral, cinematic and electronic tracks from style presets or your own MIDI. Unlike song generators, it outputs score-like material with stems and MIDI. Free accounts get limited downloads; copyright transfers to you only on paid plans.
AIVA — Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist — launched in 2016 and was one of the first systems publicly registered as a composer with a rights society (SACEM). It is built for people who need background and score music: filmmakers, game studios, YouTubers who want something other than a loop pack.
The model was trained on around 30,000 classical and contemporary scores. That training data shows. Ask for an emotional piano cue and you get something that sounds like a competent film composer took a pass at it — voiced chords, dynamics, a real ending. Ask for a pop song with a hook and you will be disappointed.
Pricing runs roughly €11/month for Standard, €33/month for Pro and €49/month for Pro Unlimited (annual billing is cheaper). The Pro tier is where copyright transfer and monetisation rights appear — a detail many reviewers skip. If you plan to put AIVA music in a monetised YouTube video or an indie game, you need Pro or above.
What separates it from Suno and Udio: AIVA is instrumental-first. No vocals, no lyric prompting, no 2-minute pop structure. The trade-off is that it produces usable multitrack material rather than a finished song. A game developer can take an AIVA cue, mute the strings and keep the percussion. That is not possible with a black-box song generator.
Generation is fast — most 90-second cues render in under 30 seconds — and the free tier gives 3 downloads per month, enough to evaluate but not to ship.
No — it is a different job. Suno and Udio win on vocals and full songs for social content. AIVA wins when you need stems, MIDI, and a track that can be edited inside a DAW. It also wins on rights clarity: the copyright position on paid AIVA plans is spelled out, while Suno’s commercial terms have shifted more than once.
Weaknesses are real. The orchestral library behind AIVA’s previews is decent but not Vienna Symphonic. The editor is basic next to a real DAW. And the “inspired by” style transfer produces recognisably derivative results if you push it too close to a living composer.