Zap "Zero-loss Audio Packer" is a lossless compressor created by famous German music software and hardware company Emagic, makers of the Logic sequencer. One can only hope Logic's interface was more tasteful...

The compressor is only available for the Mac OS platform, but there are freeware decompressors for Windows and Mac OS - actually, adware because they continuously scroll adverts for Emagic products. To use the Windows decompressor (it should really be drag-n-drop), you need to call it from the command line "unzapwin.exe file.zap".

Compression performance is very bad. I can not comment on speed since I use an emulated Mac OS 9, but compression ratio is worse than even Dakx and on par with RAR with multimedia compression enabled.

One interesting feature of Zap is that it can create (MacOS) self extracting archives. Alas, that functionality is not available in the demo version (also, the demo will not compress files larger than 500kB).

In July 2002 Emagic was bought by Apple Computer and Zap was discontinued (maybe parts of it live on in ALAC?). You can still see a mirror of the web page at the Internet Archive.

Compression performance in my limited test: 65,97%


Date: 1999-06-03
Version: 1.5 (demo)
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic
Download: zap15dem.sit - 717kB

Date: 1997-09-06
Version: 1.1.4 (full)
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic
Download: zap114.sit - 407kB

Date: 1997-01-28
Version: 1.1.2 (full)
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic
Download: zap112.sit - 356kB

Date: 1997-03-13
Version: 1.0.1 (decompressor)
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: unzapwin.zip - 157kB

Date: 1997-05-07
Version: 1.1.4 (decompressor)
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Mac OS Classic
Download: dezap.sit - 146kB