MJPEG is a format of multimedia data, which uses a frame-by-frame video track compression technology JPEG. This codec does not encode the difference (movement) between frames, whereby the image in some places does not turn out smooth enough. The main advantage of this format is the low requirements to hardware computational power, which, in turn, leads to a low level of compression and a larger resulting file size. It is actively used in web and IP-cameras.

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.