Mureka Review: One Free Song a Day, and No Way to Download It (3/5)

I wanted a scratch track. I cut short videos most weeks and I have been shipping them with borrowed music, so one evening I opened Mureka to see whether an AI song generator could give me something decent enough to lay under a clip and drop again. Eight lines I wrote myself about a night bus, one style prompt, one click. That was the plan.

The composer is the first thing that impressed me: a lyrics box, a style box, Style Reference, Templates, My prompts, Male / Female / Character vocals, and Advanced options sitting greyed out next to them. Fine. The account wall arrives when you press Create, not before, and it asks for an email rather than insisting on Google. I signed up with a plain email address, got a verification mail, clicked the link, and landed on a success page.

One thing that cost me five minutes: the verification link did not sign me in on the tab I was working in. It verified the mailbox and left the composer still asking me to log in, so I had to sign in with email and password a second time. Not a wall, just a redundant one.

Eight lines, one click, two songs

My lyric sheet was eight lines about neon and a shutter and a bus that would not stop braking. I asked for indie folk, warm acoustic guitar, soft male vocal, 90 BPM. Pressed Create, and the workspace filled up with two takes of the same song — one at 3:13, one at 1:52. Same title, same prompt, 81 seconds apart. I did not ask for two takes; it gave me two and let me pick, which I liked more than I expected.

The 3:13 one was genuinely okay. Not a masterpiece, but the kind of thing I would have hunted for on a royalty site for an afternoon. The vocal sits behind the guitar instead of fighting it, the tempo drifts a little near the end, and the mix thins out for a few bars in the middle. I left it playing twice while I worked, and the lyric panel on the right showed my own words back to me, which is a nicer feeling than I expected from a tool this mechanical.

Then a popup told me the rules. The V9.5 model was used up: one free V9.5 generation per day for the first seven days, six remaining, and after that V7.5-all, the older model, still free but always available. That part is fairly generous compared to the usual free-tier arithmetic.

Where 'free' starts counting

The download is where the music stops being mine. Every take has a download button, and it opens a modal: ‘Like what you hear? Download it in full quality with Weekly Pass.’ Underneath, the format menu lists Stems / MIDI / Session, WAV, MP3, Video and Commercial license — every single one tagged VIP. Clicking MP3 did not give me an MP3. It sent me to the pricing page.

I tried the V9.5 model again anyway, because I had edited one word in the lyric sheet — ‘a foreign key’ became ‘a borrowed key’ — and wanted to hear the change. It produced a row labelled ‘V9.5 Preview’ with a duration of exactly 01:00 and a button that says ‘Upgrade for full song’. Sixty seconds. The preview plays the edited line, so the edit itself worked, but the song ends at one minute because that is all a free account gets that day.

For reference, the model picker prices every generation in Gold: V7.5-all at 10 gold a song, V8 at 12, V9 and V9.5 at 15, O2 at 20. My new account came with 20 Gold as a one-day trial gift, and the counter read 0 by the time I had made five takes. The Weekly Pass is 4,000 Gold a week for ‘up to 400 songs’, the Yearly Pass is $12.50 a month for 20,000 Gold, and buying Gold packs without subscribing is not something free accounts get to do.

And then the composer goes quiet

The last thing I tried was another Create with a four-line lyric sheet, at zero Gold. The button did not complain. About 45 seconds later a modal appeared telling me my lyrics were incomplete and offering to optimise them for me first, with a second option to generate anyway. I took the ‘generate anyway’ path, and the answer was another modal: ‘Not Enough Gold — Subscribe and keep creating.’

No error banner on the composer, no countdown, no email saying my take is waiting somewhere. The song simply does not exist and the upsell sits where the song should have been. That is the part I keep thinking about: Mureka is not hiding the price, but the free label on the sidebar says ‘Free’ while the thing you actually want — the audio file — is unreachable from the free tier in every format.

Who it suits, then: people who want to audition ideas fast, write to a scratch song, or hear whether a lyric sings well before paying anyone. The workspace, the take picker, the instant AI cover art and the free Publish dialog are all real and all work without a card — I had a Publish dialog with my title, a generated cover and a zoom slider sitting open, and I closed it because I did not want a song under my name out in the world yet. Not for me if the output has to leave the tab: a subscriber gets unlimited MP3, WAV, stems, MIDI, watermark-free files and commercial rights, and I got sixty seconds and a gold counter that ran to zero.

I did not try the one-day Weekly Pass trial, so I cannot tell you what the first download actually looks like for a subscriber, or whether the trial music carries a watermark. I also skipped Create Video, the MV Director agent, Style Reference with a real track, voice cloning and the Extend and Trim tools — Extend is marked VIP right next to Remix and Edit, so I assume the paid tier is where that lives. And I never went past day one, so I cannot tell you what happens to the daily free V9.5 after those first seven days.

I keep the listing on ToolifyNav updated if the pricing changes.Final rating: 3 out of 5. The music is good enough to be worth paying for, the free tier is honest about how many songs you get, and the download wall is the wall. If you are only auditioning, use it. If you need the file, plan for the $12.50 plan.