asterisk users - Sep 2014 - Playback/background audio from MySQL BLOB

For some applications, storing recorded audio (prompts and caller 
recordings) as a BLOB in MySQL has advantages.

So, once I have the audio in the database, how can I play it?

Creating temporary files seems so tacky.

Is there another way to playback or background audio either by specifying 
a URL or from a memory buffer (either C or PHP)?

-- 
Thanks in advance,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
Newline                                              Fax: +1-760-731-3000

On 09/23/2014 02:17 PM, Steve Edwards wrote:
> For some applications, storing recorded audio (prompts and caller 
> recordings) as a BLOB in MySQL has advantages.
>
> So, once I have the audio in the database, how can I play it?
>
> Creating temporary files seems so tacky.
>
> Is there another way to playback or background audio either by 
> specifying a URL or from a memory buffer (either C or PHP)?
>
How about a named pipe (fifo)?  Of course then you might have issues 
with simultaneous calls.  You would have to have a pool of them and 
somehow manage locking them...

j

On Tuesday 23 Sep 2014, Steve Edwards wrote:
> For some applications, storing recorded audio (prompts and caller
> recordings) as a BLOB in MySQL has advantages.
> 
> So, once I have the audio in the database, how can I play it?
> 
> Creating temporary files seems so tacky.
> 
> Is there another way to playback or background audio either by specifying
> a URL or from a memory buffer (either C or PHP)?
Depending how many messages you have, you could use a named pipe  (FIFO)  or a 
Unix-domain socket for each one; and have the individual backend processes 
interrogate the database and dump the contents of the relevant field down it.  
As far as Asterisk is concerned, the socket / FIFO looks just like a file; it 
doesn't care much that the data in it is really coming from a process on the
other end.  This obviously suffers from the problem of decreasing 
manageability, the more message "files" you have.

But personally, I'd just store the filenames in the database; and rely on
the
unix filesystem for storing the actual file contents.  After all, that's
what a
filesystem is for.

-- 
AJS

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