I'm working on an online experimenter which could record participants' audio from the browser. The audio data I get has an extension of .wemb, so I plan to use ffmpeg to convert it to .wav while I save the data.

I tried to use PHP's shell_exec but nothing happens when I run the scripts. Then I found that my echo and print_r also did not work. I'm new to PHP and javascript, so I''m really confused now.

Below are the relevant codes, I really appreciate it if you could help!

write_data.php:

<?php
  $post_data = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true); 
  // the directory "data" must be writable by the server
  $name = "../".$post_data['filename'];
  $data = $post_data['filedata'];
   // write the file to disk
  file_put_contents($name, $data);
  
  $INPUT = trim($name) . ".webm";
  $OUTPUT = trim($name) . ".wav";
  echo "start converting...";

  // check if ffmprg is available
  $ffmpeg = trim(shell_exec('which ffmpeg'));
  print_r($ffmpeg);
  // call ffmpeg
  shell_exec("ffmpeg -i '$INPUT' -ac 1 -f wav '$OUTPUT' 2>&1 ");
?>

javascript:

  saveData: function(fileName,format){
    // save  as json by default
    if (!format){ format = 'json';}
    // add extension to filename
    fileName = `${fileName}.${format}`
    // create saveData object using fetch
    let saveData = [];
    if (format == 'json') {
        saveData = {
          type: 'call-function',
          async: true,
          func: async function(done) {
            let data = jsPsych.data.get().json();
            const response = await fetch("../write_data.php", {
              method: "POST",
              headers: {
                "content-type": "application/json"
              },
              body: JSON.stringify({ filename: fileName, filedata: data })
            });
            if (response.ok) {
              const responseBody = await response.text();
              done(responseBody);
            }
          }
        }
    } else {
        saveData = {
          type: 'call-function',
          async: true,
          func: async function(done) {
            let data = jsPsych.data.get().csv();
            const response = await fetch("../write_data.php", {
              method: "POST",
              headers: {
                "content-type": "application/json"
              },
              body: JSON.stringify({ filename: fileName, filedata: data })
            });
            if (response.ok) {
              const responseBody = await response.text();
              done(responseBody);
            }
          }
        }
    }
    return saveData;
  },