9 September 2026 · the day it happened · we tested the replacement before writing this
Suno removed v5, v4.5 and v4 from the model picker on 9 September 2026, the same day it released v6. They are not deprecated with a sunset date. They are not hidden behind a setting. On our account the picker lists three models and all three are v6.
If you came back to a project and your model is gone, that is why. Nothing is wrong with your account. Below: what replaced it, what carries over, what does not, and the one thing that genuinely changes how you should write a prompt.
Three models, described here in Suno's own words from the picker rather than paraphrased:
| Model | Who gets it | Suno's description |
|---|---|---|
v6 | Pro & Premier | “Powerful. Versatile. Refined. Our best model yet.” |
v6-wild | Pro & Premier | “Best for experimental ideas.” |
v6-mini | Everyone | “A free, more efficient version of premium v6 models.” |
They were developed with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, trained on a set of data Suno says is not the data used for previous models. Suno remains in litigation with other rights holders, so treat “developed with industry partners” as exactly what it says.
No — not on any account we can see. The picker offers v6, v6-wild and v6-mini and nothing else. There is no legacy toggle, no advanced setting, no URL parameter we could find.
Existing songs you already generated are unaffected. What you cannot do is generate a new track on v5, or A/B your old favourites against the new model to settle whether it really is better. That comparison window closed the morning it opened.
One correction we owe anyone who read our earlier guides: the widely-quoted 100-character song-title limit is not enforced by the v6 title field, which carries no limit attribute at all. We have removed that figure rather than repeat a number we cannot verify.
This is the finding that matters, and we verified it ourselves on launch day. Writing its own description of a track we generated, v6 called it “intimate chest-led Italian verses and a whispered French bridge.”
Not one of those words — Italian, French, whispered — appeared anywhere in the style
prompt. All three lived in a section cue inside the lyrics:
[Bridge | Female — Whispered, pitch drifting slightly on the hold…].
So a prompt written for v5 — a genre, some adjectives, and bare section headers — now leaves most of the model unused. Per-section performance direction, from the first bar of the intro through to the outro, is where the quality lives on v6.
We tried to improve one weak verse: changed a single section cue, held everything else byte-identical, regenerated. The first take sounded worse. The second take of the same generation sounded better.
On v6 the gap between the two takes of one generation can exceed the effect of deliberately changing your prompt. Which means most of the prompting advice published this week is measuring noise. There is a control for it — Variety, under More Options. Turn it down when you are testing a change; turn it up when exploring. And listen to both takes before deciding anything.
We ran an identical prompt through v5.5 and v6 on launch day, while both still existed — same style text, same lyrics, same section cues. On that track v6 was better on vocal flow, delivery and instrumentation. One prompt, one genre, judged by ear and not blind, so treat it as our observation rather than a benchmark. It is also a comparison nobody can repeat now.
Suno released v6 on 9 September 2026 and has said it plans to retire its older models. On our account v5, v4.5 and v4 were no longer selectable the same day.
Not on any account we can see. The model picker lists only v6, v6-wild and v6-mini, with no legacy option.
No. Existing generations stay in your library, unchanged and downloadable. Only new generations are affected.
Yes, and the field limits are unchanged — 5,000 characters of lyrics, 1,000 of style. But prompts written for v5 tend to under-specify, because v6 reads per-section performance direction that v5 largely ignored.
Suno describes v6 as powerful, versatile and refined; v6-wild as best for experimental ideas; and v6-mini as a free, more efficient version of the premium models. v6 and v6-wild require Pro or Premier.
Take-to-take variance on v6 is substantial — in our testing it exceeded the effect of a deliberate prompt change. The Variety control under More Options governs how far the two takes diverge.
HookGenius writes the part v6 now reads — the per-section performance direction from the first bar of the intro to the outro, the style prompt inside the 1,000-character budget, and the Exclude Styles block that keeps your negatives out of the style box where they'd read as instructions to include.
Describe the song in a sentence. Paste the result into v6.
5 free credits · 1 credit = a full set of lyrics, a tuned style prompt and the song's structure · no card needed
HookGenius is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Suno, Inc. or any other music generation platform named on this site. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to describe compatibility.