France Musique Opera

Among the 710 stations in France with pages, France Musique Opera is around the halfway mark. Anything in this stretch is reachable from the country's numbered pages rather than from its front table, which is why those pages exist.

Nothing else in France's listing leads with opera. The tag is self-declared, which makes it a statement of how the broadcaster positions itself rather than a classification anyone audited, and on this dial that statement is unique.

At 192 kbps the stream is on the better side of France'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.

Where France's stations mostly use MP3, this one uses AAC. Worth a line only because it is a difference, and because the country page's format breakdown is one of the quicker ways to see which providers a national dial runs on.

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.