In this new post to PHPMaster.com, Aurelio De Rosa covers an interesting use of PHP that could be handy in certain circumstances - extracting a section of a WAV audio file using the Audero Wav Extractor library.

Although PHP is well known for building web pages and applications, it can do more than that. I recently needed to extract a piece of audio from a WAV file on-the-fly and let the user download it through his browser. I tried to find a library that fit my needs but wasn't successful and had to write the code myself. It was a good opportunity to study in depth how a WAV file is made.

He starts off with an overview of what a WAV file is, how it's structured and how you can correctly figure out where in the binary data of the file the section you want is located. He then introduces the library and shows how to use it to extract "chunks" from the WAV file. He also includes an example of pulling out a chunk and saving it off to another file.

On Zend's DevZone site there's a new post about the Call for Creativity for this year's ZendCon PHP conference:

If you, or someone you know with connections to the developer community at large, have something to show, we would love to hear so we can showcase at this year's ZendCon. We are looking for music, digital artwork or video media submissions (including fun videos) which will be played or displayed at various places around the conference, with attribution, of course. Physical media submissions are also welcome though we will be limiting that to local artists.

They include some of the guidelines for submitting your work (with an obvious preference on digital media) including the formatting and what sort of topics it should be relevant to. Prizes will be offered to the winners - a spotlight in a ZendCon newsletter and press releases as well as exposure via each category on Zend's social media properties.

If you'd like to send in your submission, you can use the form on this page and link to the media you've created.

The project that strives to provide audio and video content to the PHP community has officially launched - ProTalk.

ProTalk is the brain child of Kim Rowan and Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems. A spark of an idea on IRC in July 2011 transformed into the site you see before you and we really hope you like it.

ProTalk's mission is to provide a central point of access to online audio / video content with a PHP focus. We hope to expand and include other programming languages in the future, but for now we're focussing solely on PHP and surrounding tools and skills.

All of their content is user-driven, so if you have a video or audio recording that isn't linked on the site, be sure to submit it to them and get it added to the site!

Joshua Thijssen has a new series of posts to his blog about a new extension he's created for PHP that lets you stream music files to an IceCast server with only PHP.

To continue our journey in pointless, but nevertheless fun things to create, I've created a simple PHP extension that allows you stream music data to an IceCast server in pure PHP. For this I'm using the libshout3 library which can stream both MP3 or OGG/Vorbis data to multiple stream servers (including IceCast, ShoutCast etc). In this blog-post I will try to explain how I've created this extension, and off course, how you can use it.

The series is split up into four parts:

• Part 1 - download and install (and some behind the scenes)
• Part 2 - parts of the extension and a first test
• Part 3 - populating the store, adding getters
• Part 4 - creating setters and some other random functionality

You can find the source for this extension over on his gihub repository.

As mentioned in this new post to her blog Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems and Kim Rowan are starting a new project to provide audio and video recordings of tutorials specifically targeted towards PHP developers - ProTalk.

We feel that video and audio recordings have been an underrated medium for too long. We believe they actually provide an excellent vehicle for getting your ideas across and can be a more effective means of learning for beginners and professionals alike than the written word. Slides are great also, but so much of the message is lost without the speaker's narration to guide you through. We know there are conferences that record the talks and we'd like to centralize all this content at ProTalk for easy access to everyone that is interested. Another important thing to emphasise here is that we propose to create a community-driven site. We will create, manage and maintain it, but we'll need a regular flow of content and that's where you come in!

To get the ball rolling, they're looking for feedback on a few questions - do you think the PHP community could benefit from this, would you be willing to contribute and any suggestions on how the site should work/what it should offer.

Lorna Mitchell has new post today pointing out the release of both the slides and the audio from a presentation she gave at the PHP UK conference (back in February of this year) about some of the best practices in API design and development.

I really enjoyed giving this talk, since I work so much with APIs and enjoy sharing my ideas. The audio is now online so if you missed the talk, feel free to have a listen. You can also see the slides (on slideshare) and also read the series of blog posts I wrote on this topic which originally inspired the talk.

Lorna has also posted slides for several other of her web services talks including Working with Web Services, PHP and Web Services and Archtecting Web Service Applications.

In a new post to his blog today Conor Mac Aoidh talks about a way he's developed to get audio alerts whenever PHP errors pop up in your scripts using the swatch tool.

Kae posted today about tackling this problem under Linux, but I've found that it's quite a different task under OS X.

It also uses some additional Perl modules (like Date::Calc and Date::Manip) to set up swatch. From there it's just a matter of adding a few lines to a configuration file to watch for the errors and sound the "bell". A few bash scripts will need to be added to correctly start the service too.

Paul Morgan dropped me a line to let me know about the latest of the talks from this year's PHP London conference being posted:

• Scott MacVicar and Mike Sullivan - Lessons learned from the front line. They provide useful checkpoints across a wide range of topics to help keep projects in check.
• Marcus Bointon - Mail() and Life after Mail(); (Marcus has recorded an additional segment to cover the slides he was unable to cover at the conference. This is well worth a listen for the tips he passes on in handling bounces and getting emails through to the intended recipient).
• Frameworks debate (Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and Symfony) plus an extended audience debate and an interesting and humourous last thought from a member of the audience.
• Derick Rethans (closing keynote) - Personal homepage tools have grown up. Derick looks back over the development of php and offers some tips and insights into using php to it's fullest potential.

Each of the above talks also has audio (mp3) you can download and listen to to follow along with the slides. Check out the main conference site for more great PDF and audio of the presentations from this year's event.

In this new post from the splitbrain.org website (creators of the Dokuwiki application), there's an example of how to join wav files together with PHP with a quick and easy script.

I'm currently working on a CAPTCHA plugin for DokuWiki and thought about providing audio output for users not able to see the image. This is pretty simple for CAPTCHAs - there is no need for complicated speech synthesis because you only need recordings of the 26 possible letters. But you need a way of joining those recordings on the fly...

There was an example he found previously, but it seemed like overkill, so he rolled together his own solution - a 24 line script that takes in the filenames of the wav files and spits back out the joined resource. This functionality has already been added to the CAPTCHA plugin if you'd like to check it out.

Niall Kennedy is attending this year's OSCON as well, and brings us this new blog post covering another of Rasmus Lerdorf's talks covering the scaling web applications in PHP.

Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O'Reilly's Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus's talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row.

Niall also talks more about rich web applications, interaction models, and the use of http_load, the Valgrind emulation tool, prepared statements, the use of the APC, and the improved XML support included in PHP5.