FIP Metal

Out of 710 entries in France, this one ranks 125. The upper quarter of a national list is an interesting place to be: well known enough to have accumulated opens, not so well known that it is the station everybody already had.

No language is recorded against this station. The field is optional in the public directory and a great many entries skip it, so an empty language says nothing about what you will hear when you press play. It does keep the station off the language shelves, since a shelf built on guesses would be worse than a shelf with holes.

Only two entries in France put hard rock first. The tag is self-declared and inconsistent between countries, which is why the rail below is worth more as a way of wandering than as a filter.

192 kbps, which puts FIP Metal above the 128 kbps that a typical entry in France runs at.

The format here is AAC, against a listing for France overwhelmingly made of MP3. Both play in a browser; the difference shows up in how much quality survives at a given bitrate, where AAC has the advantage at lower rates.

The stream address on this entry points at icecast.radiofrance.fr, which is where 19 other stations in France 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.