Hi,
Texas instruments, as well as analog devices are good manufacturers of audio codecs. Most are fairly straight forward doing the job by themselves requiring only a microcontroller to configure registers via SPI, or I2C. There are so many including the ever faithful AC'97 codec (nabbed one from a soundcard a few years ago).
Packaging can be an issue as they are not available in DIP...as least I've yet to see one. However, there are plenty of SMD -> DIP adapters around (ebay, digikey, farnell, RS etc..). If would mean soldering the chip yourself, but it is not that difficult...tape the chip in place, plenty of flux, THIN solder...just flood all the pins along one side then use a desoldering tool (or copper solder braid) to take off the excess.
As for a micro, check out
https://www.sparkfun.com Or
https://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html
both have nice cheap dev boards for many micro's, some of which have built in USB and SD card sockets. They also provide example code for you (as well as a wicked forum).
It is quite a big project to take on, however, since most of the work is done automatically by the codec chip, I'm sure once you get going it should be fairly straight-forward. it is just a question of programming the micro for various task (USB, SDcard reading/writing etc..).
Also note that '44.1Khz' is pretty old now. Although CD's still use that sample rate, generally (for crystal selection purposes) it is 48kHz or 96kHz also many codecs are 20-24bit. You 'may' be able to get some discontinued codec chips from ebay, but these will still be surface mount, just with the old 16-bit 44.1kHz.
Failing that...you could always buy a cheap soundcard, as they go for about 9USD now days, and solder wires to parts of the board to give you access to the codec. It will have all the necessary analogue on board for line inputs and output, and you could bypass the PCI connection.
Blueteeth