Triple j Hottest

In Australia's ordering this is number 66 of 140, which is the middle of the list. The stations either side of it are a better guide to what the country sounds like than the head of the list is, because the head is the same few famous streams in every country.

At 252 kbps the stream is on the better side of Australia's dial, where the median is 128 kbps. Not dramatically so, and bitrate is only one of several things that decide whether a stream sounds good, but it is the one the directory records.

Triple j Hottest publishes an HLS stream. That is a modern and perfectly good way to broadcast, and it is also why the button on this page may not start it: HLS needs a player that can read a playlist and fetch segments, which a browser audio tag does not do on its own.

The stream address on this entry points at mediaserviceslive.akamaized.net, which is where 27 other stations in Australia are served from as well. Platforms of that size carry the long tail of a country's dial, and they are the reason a listing can look broken when it is one host having a quiet hour.

Triple j Hottest and ABC Classic HLS are described by the directory in very nearly the same fields, which makes the differences between them worth stating rather than leaving to be inferred. The other entry carries the abc, classical and public radio tags and this one does not.