Well, we went with the Edirol, and it's been working well for us. So far I've recorded a voice lesson in our living room, a song swap at a friend's house, and a set at a festival (with the permission of the performer - and with the recorder in my purse to avoid hassles) - and they all came out fine using the internal mics! I've been recording everything as reasonably high quality MP3 - my goal in all cases wasn't to have CD-quality material, but to be able to hear the words and the tune.

It is a bit pricy ($421 US from FullCompass - which (to put it a mini-plug) usually has great prices, though you do have to call them to get the price), but I can copy a 30-minute set (47 MB as 192 kbps stereo MP3) to my hard drive in under a minute) and we don't need external mics (tho' we did get a pair to use if we couldn't get the recorder near the center of the music).

And it does record WAV files if we wanted to do something at that level. (It's not what I'd use for serious recording - but that was never the goal; I have other stuff for that, and would rather have the victim - oops, I mean performer - come here where I have a handle on ambient noise.)

The 1 GB card we got for it will record around 11 hours at the 192 kbps setting - which should be enough for all but the really dedicated song circles!

If you have any specific questions, let me know. I can also post some snippets from our recordings if anyone is interested.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments - I now do know a lot more about the alternatives than I did when I started the thread!

JudyB