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.

OGA is an audio extension for OGG file and it was developed by Xiph.Org Foundation. OGG is an open container format designed for streaming and may contain independent video, text and audio files. To open OGA, you need either to install an appropriate software like Vorbis, or to convert the file to a more common format.