1) __construct() should have ZEND_ACC_CTOR in its flags field.
What does that do specifically?
It's a hint for the engine... Causes special handling in cases like exceptions being thrown from the constructor.
2) Speaking of __construct(), you could save some memory/cpu by
storing your resource in an extended zend_object struct using an
overrided object_ctor method and tossing out __construct() since
you don't need any parameters anyway.
True, I just found it a handy place to store the voice pointer
which I knew worked from prior code I had written. Do you
happen to have a short code snippet illustrating your suggestion.
Sure, not only is it a more tried-and-tested (and familiar) method, but it's the only PHP4 compatable one. Which brings up one thing... Seems like this implementation could be made ZE1 compatable with a few conditional defines (though that'd preclude going the overloaded zend_object route of course). PHP4 is pretty crusty and probably not worth supporting, but it's a thought....
Anyway, on the subject of zend_object overloading.... I wouldn't call it a simple example, but Runkit_Sandbox does this (and then some), when I've got a minute I'll see if I can cobble a simpler one together.
3) A save_to_file() method would seem appropriate
Agreed, I just needed to learn more about that first to
make sure I was doing it the "PHP" way.
Take a look at file_put_contents(), it'll probably be the simplest example for you to work from.
4) Are there other voices? Is there a way (planned)
to change them?
Not by default, but it's possible to have additional voices
if converted. I'm still exploring this and once I have
something working I will start tying that in.
I look forward to it!
5) It'd be handy to be able to fetch metadata about
the wave (num channels, samples per second, etc...)
Are the samples always a particular format?
(16bit, signed/unsigned, big/little endian)
Currently they are always little endian. I haven't built
big endian support in yet. It would be a simple matter
to have getters for num channels, samples per second,
etc so I will add them later this week.
Is that because of the WAV standard? The library implementation? Or just because your ext doesn't take advantage of any ability to change that setting.
6) Would you like some exports in oggvorbis so that
TTS data can be pumped striaght into an ogg/vorbis
output file?
That would be awesome! I was looking into doing mp3,
but ogg/vorbis would be much better due to licensing issues.
I thought twice about this after sending my last post, it'd probably be simpler just to send the wav data to the user and let them pump it out to the stream rather than complicating source with optional dependencies.
file_put_contents('ogg:///path/to/file.ogg', $tts->get_wave());
Although.... then the user has to be aware of and pass the right PCM encoding constant LE16...whatever it was.... I havn't touched oggvorbis in....well a very long time....
We can kick this particular idea around a little more....See what falls out...
-Sara