You won't get battery powered CD recording in anything very small. Obviously the CD size is one limitation, but the battery power required for burning a CDR is, I think, a show stopper.

I agree that the next step is to go to WAV and do everything else on the computer. The compression shouldn't be a problem for anyone doing field and live recordings - there are many more urgent sound quality issues to deal with. As for proprietary formats, I sympathize but if you're using Windows you're up to the neck in proprietary formats anyway (including WAV !)

Anahata