Ottawa CHEZ 106.1 (CHEZFM)

Ottawa CHEZ 106.1 (CHEZFM) is at 82 in a listing of 259. Read the rank as a rough position rather than a standing: the click counts in the middle of a long national list are close enough together that a handful of opens moves a station several places.

Hard rock is the station's own leading tag and no other entry in Canada uses it that way. Worth reading as self-description: the directory takes tags as broadcasters type them and does not reconcile them.

At 48 kbps this is one of the lowest rate streams on Canada's dial, whose median is 96 kbps. It will hold a connection almost anywhere, which is the tradeoff being made.

The stream is served as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.

13 of Canada's entries are served from rogers-hls.leanstream.co, this one among them. A shared host means a shared fate. If this stream is silent, the fastest check is not this station's own site but whether its neighbours on the same platform are playing.