An SPX file is a Speex audio file saved within an Ogg Vorbis container. Speex is an open source patent-free audio format designed for speech compression. It supports variable bitrate (VBR) encoding and several features not found in other audio codecs. Some examples include embedded encoding, intensity stereo encoding, and voice activity detection.

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.