AU is a file extension for a sound file format belonging to Sun, NeXT and DEC and used in UNIX. The AU file format is also known as the Sparc-audio or u-law fomat. AU files contain three parts: the audio data and text for a header (containing 24 bytes) and an annotation block.

SPHERE (SPeech HEader Resources) is a file format defined by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and is used with speech audio. SoX can read these files when they contain μ-law and PCM data. It will ignore any header information that says the data is compressed using shorten compression and will treat the data as either μ-law or PCM. This will allow SoX and the command line shorten program to be run together using pipes to encompasses the data and then pass the result to SoX for processing.