I have searched the web to no avail about the pros and cons of Steinberg's OSQ (Original Sound Quality) format. It's included in Wavelab since version 4.0 and I wonder how it compares to other lossless codecs.

I don't worry so much about tagging, not sure what else I should consider important?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

compression, seeking, encoding and decoding speed.. i don't have access to the format;. why don't you download Monkeys and FLAC and do some comparisons to OSQ?

I ran a few tests on this and found that Steinberg's OSQ files are about 1% larger than FLAC (5) and about 3-4% larger than .ape files encoded with the 'normal' setting. I did compare against other formats as well (Shorten, Wavepack, RK Audio). Not very scientific this test, I know, but it was good enough for me to rank it against 'the established' formats.

Since OSQ is only being used in wavelab (not even Cubase SX supports it at the moment) and despite repeated promises no plug-in for any player is available yet, so I am not pursuing this any further.

As for 'seeking', the lack of any player supporting this format (and wavelab decoding immediately when opening a file), no test can be done on that front.

Looking at all this, I much rather had seen Steinberg implementing an existing compression algorhythm, rather than spending time on developing one on their own.