This is another paragraph from the Times article addressing "already been remastered and put on CD" concern:

"Much of the original Folkways collection has been released on CD, but a majority of it has not been commercially available because the demand is so low. Of the roughly 40,000 tracks in the catalog, only about 5,700 have been commercially released, said Atesh Sonneborn, the label's assistant director. Smithsonian Folkways makes copies of anything from its collection on request, and now every track will now be available on MSN Music."

---
However, a cursory exploration shows that it's certainly not the full catalog there at the moment. Maybe "every track" is the ultimate plan for when they do it themselves, instead of through Microsoft. It sure seems like distributing something is better than nothing for a lot of those recordings.

Also, the poster to Ballad-L (who was involved with beta-testing) whom I quoted at the top, mentions "Synchrotext", which I also don't see mentioned yet. Perhaps that's they way the album notes will come, whatever "Synchrotext" is.

~ Becky