ALL SIGNAL, NO NOISE.

The premise

For decades, making music meant one of two things: learning an instrument, or paying for samples and praying the licensing held up. AI changed that almost overnight — suddenly a game developer, a video editor, or a podcaster could generate original sound from a sentence. But it created a new problem: a flood of AI tools, each with louder marketing than the last, and "reviews" that are really just affiliate ads in disguise.

City of Punk exists to cut through that. We don't sell a sound generator — we test the ones that do, in public, and tell you the truth about each: which actually sounds good, which licence really lets you ship, which is worth the subscription. Having no product of our own to push means we've got no reason to bend the verdict.

What we believe

• AI is an instrument, not a replacement. Taste still decides what ships. These tools get you raw material at the speed of thought — what you do with it is still the craft.
• Independence is the point. We don't sell a generator, so we have no tool to oversell. We earn through clearly-labelled affiliate links — never paid rankings — and the verdict is always ours.
• Honesty is a feature. Every tool gets something wrong: mushy output, shaky vocals, a licence with teeth. We say so plainly. A publication you can't trust is just noise.

The Signal

The Signal is our publication — guides, tutorials, and brutally honest reviews and comparisons of AI music and sound tools, royalty-free sound, and the future of production. It's edited by Nova Reyes, a sound designer who spent a decade scoring indie games and short films before AI tools existed, and who still owns four broken synthesizers.

The Signal's rule is simple: every piece has to be useful to a reader trying to choose a tool, not sell them one. We review without sponsorships, we name the tool that's genuinely the right answer even when it isn't the one that pays us, and we keep a disclosure page that explains exactly where the lines are.

The name

Punk was never a genre — it was a refusal to wait for permission. You didn't need a label, a studio, or anyone's blessing; you needed three chords and something to say. The machine age has its own gatekeepers — and its own hype machine. City of Punk is where you cut through the noise and make it yourself.