So I have been told that the ADC built into Arduinos are unable to sample at very high quality nor can the memory of an Arduino store a very large sample. If it is not apparent yet, I don't know much about audio sampling and so far I have found it more complicated than I thought.
What I am looking to accomplish is to record a 10 second or so recording at mp3 quality, maybe a bit lower. That's it.
Can someone point me in the right direction of how to accomplish this? Is there a ic chip I can buy? Do you use external DAC's and memory?
The hardware I have now is an Uno with a SD card and an electret microphone breakout board.
Basically yes.
For CD like quality you need a sample rate of about 40KHz with a 16 bit sample size.
So the memory you need for 10 seconds recording is 40000 * 2 * 10 = 800K
That is a lot of memory to add to a normal arduino.
It is more than is even in the Due.
You would also need a 16bit D/A for the output.
All in all this is a bit advanced for a beginner.