[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@email-addr-hidden