{{unreferenced, date=March 2010
Original Sound Quality (OSQ) is an
audio file format
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, ofte ...
Wavelab
WaveLab is a digital audio editor and recording computer software application for Windows and macOS, created by Steinberg. WaveLab was started in 1995 and it is mainly the work of one programmer, Philippe Goutier.
Audio can be edited as a sin ...
4'' (and following releases) for lossless
audio data compression
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...
.
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
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
, which reach compression rates up to 90% because of their
lossy compression
In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...
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.