Radio Balises

Radio Balises sits in the tail of France's 710 entries. The tail is the part of a directory that goes missing first, and it is the part worth keeping: the head of every country's list is the same handful of national broadcasters, and everything that makes a dial local is behind them.

At 70 kbps, this sits below most of France's listing, whose median is 128 kbps. 74% of the country's stations reach 128 kbps or better, so the dial around it is mostly higher.

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.

Its audio comes from stream.radios.bzh. Four other stations in France stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.