Malcolm,

I think you've pretty well covered it, or my understanding of it anyway. Just to add that the new CDs will likewise be called Voice of the People. Also, if I've got it correct, I think they're going to be issued as several seperate multi disc compilations, rather than, as with the original VOTPs, which of course were sold as stand alones.   

BTW., As far as I know and am pretty certain, the original tapes were wiped and reused after the recordings were transferred to shellac. Sounds atrocious I know. But that was pretty standard archiving practice in those days, the cost of tape being horrendous.

BTW also, I'm currently working my way through the pile of Folktrax cassettes which were given to me as part of Keith Summers' record collection. To describe them as pluperfect awful is to use the understatment of the century. Lousy sound, unreadable photocopied non-existant notes, and mix and match splicing like there's no tomorrow. On one cassette, a single track has been collated from 22 splices of 10 different recordings.

And of course, in most cases there's no indication as to who the collector was, and buggar all information on the people who gave him the recordings.

Also, like cheap cassettes everywhere, these things drag and skew on the slightest provocation. You can get some very startling noises when that happens. EG., a cassette of West African guitarists comes to mind. It plays fine on side 1. Turn it over and the guitar becomes intermittantly inaudible. In its place I can hear, quite distinctly, a concertina playing a morris dance tune!

Roll on the new VOTPs - and the return of sanity.