[linux-audio-user] Portable field recording set-up?

Hi, For a project of mine, I would need a portable, affordable ($200-250) way to make quality stereo recordings of natural and/or urban environments. Here are the criteria I have defined so far: * sr should be at least 44.1khz * recording should be stereo * if compressed, prefer lossless compression, otherwise, good quality encoding: minimum 160kbps * Should be reasonably portable (i.e compact and battery-operated) and sturdy. So far, the idea I came up with is to use one of those little Iriver flash players, or even one of their hd-based ones, if I can find one chap enough, with a stereo mic going into a little pre-amp, then going into the Iriver's line-in. Anybody has any comments on such a set-up? Any other idea comes to mind? I heard that minidisc recorders do a very good job when used for field recordings, and that many already have inputs for a stereo mic, but, as far as I could tell, they interact very poorly with Linux, and they use a proprietary compression format. How accurate is this? Has anybody had a positive experience with a minidisc recorder and Linux? Thanks, S.M. -- smassy(a)sdf.lonestar.org