Giorgio Sancristoforo No-Fi is a new standalone cassette tape loop studio application, allowing you to deep into lo-fi music production.
Update: NO-Fi is available now for Windows
Nowadays, music is almost always created in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). It is the software environment that musicians use today to produce music. Packed with virtual instruments, effects, and other tools for music production.
It was not always like that. In the past, musicians recorded their sounds on tapes, looped them, and created new tracks with these. There were no computers, plugins, etc. The tape was the DAW. Giorgio Sancristoforo now takes us back to this time. In a new software but with the same simple idea.
Giorgio Sancristoforo No-Fi
No-Fi is not a classic DAW. Giorgio Sancristoforo’s new standalone application does not want to replace the DAW either. It is intended to offer musicians a different approach to working with audio.
The goal is introducing musicians to the simple production approach with tape loops. But with the same crunchy, lo-fi character from the past. Or, in simple words: plugin, record, and mix like the real hardware. All about simplicity.
Cassette Core
No-Fi consists of one main mixer, five cassette recorders, a reverb, and a delay. Each cassette recorder has a channel onto which you can feed with external audio. This can be audio from external signals like synthesizers, drum machines, guitars, bass, microphones, and more
The app is not a plugin but can host VST/AU plugin, allowing you to play your sounds from them via MIDI in the cassette recorder.
Giorgio goes to great lengths to reproduce the iconic character. Each recorder has simple stop, record, and play buttons. Additionally, it offers settings for recording and playback. Before recording, you can choose between three different cassette types (Ferric, Chrome, and Ferrochrome) and adjust the age, noise, and saturation.
This way you can infuse the wobbly, lo-fi goodness during the recording process in your tracks. According to the developer, the cassette tape loops can record up to 1 hour of sound each. Plus, you can import your own loops from your computer.
Then, you can modify the playback, including the speed, and with various parameters infusing errors in your recording (azimuth, catch, wow, and flutter).
In the final stage, you can bring all the loops together in the built-in mixer. Mix in delay and reverb as needed, etc. And everything that goes in here comes out with a noisy, warm, lo-fi coating.
Thanks to the MIDI integration, you can also control everything with a MIDI controller and use it in live performances.
First Impression
No-Fi is a beautiful homage to this simple tape workflow and the era of tape recorders. Another excellent standalone software from Giorgio Sancristoforo. It’s one of these releases with which you can break out of your all-day DAW habits and discover new things.
Giorgio Sancristoforo No-Fi is available now for 19,90€ as a standalone application for macOS and Windows. This is not a VST/AU plugin.
More information here: Giorgio Sancristoforo
FINALLY!!!! I remember buying portatron and only realizing after that I cant record looks, just load audio. Everything else about portatron was great but the inability to use it as a looper, and by looper I mean live looping, was kind of disappointing. After extensively looking online for a software looper and either finding very convoluted options, windows only or audio slicer/loopers. I realized that the only good live loopers were either abletons looper or M4L devices.
Not this jumps into the race and all I can say is I cant wait to try it out. Will stop me from the inevitable next steps which is buying a tascam and cassettes and looping in analog which I dont really have an appetite for.
Yes! Windows version now!
Can’t wait to try this.
Analog loops on old 4 tracks is a lot of fun. But fiddly. And time consuming. And also not really spontaneous, it’s best to have an idea in mind beforehand.
With this though all those buts / negatives go away.
I’ll be getting this straight away.