France Inter (Bose)

In France's ordering this is number 333 of 710, 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.

The stream is 107 kbps where France's median is 128. Below the country's middle, which usually points at an older encoder or a deliberate choice to stay light, and matters far more for music than for talk.

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.

This one is HLS, a segmented format rather than a single continuous stream. It is worth knowing because the failure is specific and fixable rather than a dead station: the address works, the browser just cannot open that shape of address unaided.

36 of France's entries are served from stream.radiofrance.fr, 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.