trying to figure out why the start of samples are not working so well. It seems to be worse when sox (instead of flac) is used. This seems to indicate that conversion in the main thread is a bad idea because samples from arecord seem to get lost (I thought they would be bufferedin processed in between conversions)
Revert to only outputing the last bit of silence.
Revert (again) to outputing only the last bit of silence. (i.e do the refactoring/debugging in a branch)