Rainbow - 1997 - The Very Best Of Rainbow-flac-... Site

Using a newly purchased Plextor CD-R drive (a $400 marvel), he ripped his personal UK-pressed 1997 Polydor CD The Very Best of Rainbow at exact offset. He encoded the tracks using FLAC 0.90 beta—the first stable version of the Free Lossless Audio Codec, which had just been released in July 1997. He chose FLAC over SHN (Shorten) because it offered better compression and built-in error checking.

Today, that subject line is a nostalgic fossil—a reminder of the era when sharing a 400MB lossless album over 56k dial-up required two weeks of patience, and when "The Very Best of Rainbow" wasn't just a playlist, but a carefully crafted digital time capsule from a fan who wanted to hear every single note of Ritchie Blackmore's guitar exactly as the master tape intended.

The subject line, , is a classic digital artefact from the early days of lossless music sharing. Here’s the proper story behind it.