most machines will be ram-bound during the decode phase
cull out audio file normalization into standalone util
refactor kaldi2json, fixing regex bug
segmentation step occasionally fails on 16k files. isolated
to the wav2pem script phase, which seems to have needed a little nudge
to trim an extra 0.1 second from the end of the analyzed file length.
If the loss proves problematic could probably scale back. Presumably
the problem was that samplerate was too coarse and the CMUSeg script
would fail trying to read beyond the end of the actual file sample length.
It worked fine as-is with 44.1k and 32k sample rates. Only 16k would
occasionally fail.

added debug and more error checking along the way.