Building A Linux Music Studio (LinuxPlanet)

I'll second the author's recommendation of the Handy Zoom2 recorder:
I have never seen anything better for doing dirt-simple, high-fidelity
field recording.  I know musicians who record all their gigs with the
device, which is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, and have been
blown away by the quality of the recording.

For example, this track was made with the Zoom2 sitting on the floor
in the middle of a rehearsal including full horn and rhythm sections;
it captured an amazingly faithful (and useful) live track:

  http://palladion.com/static/Dragonsbane-Well_You_Neednt-2...

For extra bonus points, the device Just Works(TM) with Linux.
When plugged in over USB (it is bus powered!), it functions as either
a USB disk, allowing you to retrieve the field recordings, or as an ALSA
soundcard using the onboard mikes and line out.

One quibble with the article:  I didn't find it necessary to go through
the SOX conversion dance:  Audacity was happy to read the raw WAV files
directly, after copying to the hard-drive (the USB interface is too
slow to work directly from the recorder for large files).

Uh, I don't see in which way this article should help to build a music studio.  I would have
expected a comparision of multi trackers instead.  I dislike seeing LWN to become a generic
link farm featuring "tutorials".