RA to SPH Converter

RA is an audio format developed by RealNetworks to use in its RealPlayer for streaming audio which means that it can be played while downloading. It uses several audio codecs, they range from the ones for delivering high-fidelity sound to those for recording low bitrate audio data. Although, the format was pretty popular and was used by many radio station to stream online, now it is technically inferior to other newer formats.

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.