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.

Dolby Digital film format, developed for encoding audio tracks for films. It supports up to 6 audio channels: left, right, front, rear, upper and lower. Because of this, it allows you to store “3-dimensional” audio tracks. It’s widely used both in movie theaters and by the users themselves for storing audio tracks in film libraries at home.