Getting Remote Audio File

I'm working on a Laravel API project that accepts audio file input as a remote url. I need to access this file and extract the duration metadata.

To achieve the duration I'm using php wapmorgan\Mp3Info\Mp3Info; library. The library works fine for local files but fails for remote files.

My challenge is that all efforts to get the remote file fails. I've tried:

• php cURL
• Laravel's Http client
• PHP's php file_get_contents and php fopen functions

The above 3 methods are failing with the message:

[2022-04-28 09:33:26] local.ERROR: fopen(http://localhost:8000/storage/audios/jo4christ48-at-yahoocom/single-voice-call.mp3): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!
...

Also, the request seems quite slow. Sometimes, I terminate the request otherwise, nothing else works.

Here's my code for fetching the remote file and extracting the duration metadata.

/**
     * calculates the units for remote files
     * 
     * @param int $numbers_count
     * @param string $file_url
     * @return array
     */
    protected function calculate_units_remote(int $numbers_count, string $file_url)
    {
        // get the file
        // $ch = curl_init();

        // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
        // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        // curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $file_url);

        // $file = curl_exec($ch);
        // curl_close($ch);

        // $response = Http::get($file_url);

        // if (!$response->successful()) {
        //     return [
        //         'status' => false,
        //         'message' => 'The remote file cannot be reached.'
        //     ];
        // }

        // $file = $response->body();

        $file = file_get_contents($file_url);

        if (!$file) {
            return [
                'status' => false,
                'message' => 'The remote file cannot be reached.'
            ];
        }


        // get the duration of the remote file
        $file = new Mp3Info($file);
        $duration = $file->duration;

        // get user plan
        $plan = Auth::user()->user_plan()->plan ?? Plan::where('type', 2)
            ->where('default', true)->first();

        $units_per_second = $plan->units_per_second;

        $units = $units_per_second * $duration * $numbers_count;

        return [
            'status' => true,
            'units' => ceil($units)
        ];
    }

The above function is called in a controller as show below:

...
// calculate units
$units = $this->calculate_units_remote(count($unique_numbers), $data['file']);
...

Note: I've enabled the allow_file_open extension in the init file and allowed incoming request on firewall (ufw) as recommended by some threads on stackoverflow.