Dakx started as a Mac OS Classic lossless audio compressor (Dakx Aif) developed by David A. Kopf that later got ported to Windows.

The Mac application is very strange. As soon as you load a WAV file (I could not get it to load an AIFF file) it starts being converted to DAX. And as soon as you load a DAX file, the waveform is displayed and it starts being played - you can otherwise only start and stop playback at the "Display" (!?) menu.

The Mac version offers a high quality equalizer. For some reason, the volume slider is also located in the equalizer (and since version 1.0 does not feature the equalizer, it does not have volume control either). Other features are CD audio (no CDDB) and line-in import, and the ability to change the color of most screen elements.

The Windows version, despite being much less featureful than the Mac one, has a highlight of its own: the "Q" slider allows users to truncate the bit depth of the file being played in real time. Besides that, the "V" slider is the volume control, and the "M" slider is meant to adjust compression ratio vs. speed (but even the best compression mode offers terrible performance compared to other lossless compressors). And it too features a baffling interface.

The Dakx LLC web site can still be visited at the Internet Archive.

Compression performance in my limited test: 62,86% (S setting)


Date: 1999-12-13
Version: 1.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: daxwav32.zip - 71kB

Date: 1999-08-21
Version: 1.1
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic (fat binary)
Download: daxaif1.1.sit - 141kB

Date: 1999-02-23
Version: 1.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic 68K
Download: daxaif1.0.sit - 89kB