I have a little portable Panasonic cassette recorder that has the very useful ability to playback at half speed (half speed is exactly one octave down). This means that if you use it to record tunes at a session it is a lot easier to learn them slowly at home later. The panasonic is small enough to live in my fiddle case and cheap enough not to worry about on a pub table.

Therefore I would recommend that if you intend to record tunes at sessions to learn then go for a cassetee player with a half speed feature. If you just want the best quality small recorder then go mini disk.

Ian S