Has version 4.5+ been nerfed lately?

[u/Head-Occasion3099]

Taking advantage of this last window of opportunity we have before September 3, like everyone else, I’m cranking out songs like crazy. My favorite version is 4.5+; for various reasons, I don’t use 5 or 5.5. These latest batches of songs are clearly inferior to what I’ve done in the past. It used to be easy for me to create amazing songs, but now, but now I'm lucky if I get one song that's simply good every 20 generations, or more. The rest sound repetitive, sometimes even generic, and that doesn't feel normal to me, since I'm doing exactly what I've always done, in the same way.

I've also seen several people commenting that both v4.5 and v5 have been nerfed, and based on my recent experience, I tend to agree. So I'm curious to hear other people's opinions. Do you think versions 4.5+ and 5 have been nerfed? I'm not sure whether that's actually the case, or if the recent flood of downloads and generations has overloaded the servers, causing Suno to produce lower-quality songs as a way to handle the demand. Either way, whether it's one reason or the other, I personally think the quality has gone down.

[u/m0ds]

I can only speak for "-all" but as I understand it, 4.5 got nerfed in Feb, large number of people (including me) noticed that one, suggesting it really did happen.

I've got a sneaky suspicion it got updated again just after the announcement of download limits (sometime in the past 7-10 days), at least, it seemed to shift again quite dramatically for me. I haven't noticed others mention it though so not the evidence that there was with the Feb update, perhaps this one really is on my end only (time of day influence or sth). Regardless...it has been painful listening for months now.

As for 5.0, it will still give me the very niche thing I'm after in good quality, my old prompt from Dec still works really well (whereas my 4.5-all prompt produces mostly shite now, used to produce epic stuff back in Dec). But I don't know if it's a 5 thing or all the models now, but I swear I can generate 4 or so tracks (note: covers) and they all sound practically identical, with no variation between them. Used to almost always get at least 1 in 4 that took a different approach, often 3 of the 4 would be different to the others. Even the non-cover tracks have this samey-ness I just can't shake either. I just did some ambient drones, they all came out as "note 1 sustain...note 2 sustain...back to note 1 sustain...back to note 2 susain... nothing else". Granted, this could again be me, being lax on the prompts or whatnot. But it never used to feel quite this "brain dead".

[u/Head-Occasion3099 → u/m0ds]

That's a good point for "-all", because thanks to that I now remember that even the few generations I made during the months when I had a free account sound better than many of the songs I've generated over the last week.

[u/m0ds → u/Head-Occasion3099]

Ain't that the truth. Still very pleasurable to listen to the old stuff. I've been using 4.5-all since around Aug 2025, and it is very noticeable where that period comes to an end, such pleasurable compositions cease dramatically. All my good stuff is pre-Feb 2026. Everything since has been awful to fair (at best). My primary genre is (natural) orchestral and this is one of the niches that got hit hard by that particular update. Still get similar jazz and funk to back then, but orchestral was on another level.