Steve,
Been away for a few days helping out with arrival of 5th grandchild. All fine now and back home. What can I say - thanks you, thank you.
I am modifying your example a little to explore limits of parameters on my phone and create a few files of different sizes to examine more closely. At present I am doing that examination in Excel as it allows for great detail of tracing and debugging - with subsequent quite easy conversion to B4A. My objectives are no more than a ranked measure of the correctness of a pronunciation for a word. More difficult than I had hoped but may still be possible.
Thank you , I am "on my way" again.