Original Sound Quality

This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Original Sound Quality" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Original Sound Quality (OSQ) is an audio file format developed in 2002 by Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH and implemented e.g. in their audio editing software Wavelab 4 (and following releases) for lossless audio data compression.

In combination with good source material this format allows compression rates up to 50%. Because of that it is not comparable to other audio formats like MP3, which reach compression rates up to 90% because of their lossy compression algorithms. Therefore, OSQ is used rather for archiving then for daily use.

When using this format it is important to know that OSQ is a proprietary format developed by Steinberg that is generally speaking not supported by other audio software tools. A possible alternative to OSQ might be the free codec FLAC.

Sources[edit]

• Translation of German Wikipedia article

References[edit]

• Music Software Glossary OSQ
• Emusic 01.11.2002: Wavelab 4.0
• Golem 18.01.2002: Steinberg presents Wave-Editor WaveLab 4.0 (German article)