FIP Groove

FIP Groove is at 216 in a listing of 710. 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.

FIP Groove streams at 107 kbps, under France's median of 128 kbps. A lower rate is not automatically worse: speech carries perfectly well below the music threshold, and a station built for phones on a weak connection has a good reason to encode this way.

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.

The audio comes from stream.radiofrance.fr, and 35 other stations in France are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of France's listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.