SWR 2 [AAC 96k]

Rank 1334 of 1,409 in Germany. What that mostly measures is how many people have already found the station through this directory, which is a poor proxy for anything else and an honest one to publish.

The open count against SWR 2 [AAC 96k] is one, which is enough to know the stream has been played through the directory and not enough to compare it with anything. Small counts are the normal case out here, and a ranking built from them separates stations by luck as much as by interest.

SWR 2 [AAC 96k] streams at 96 kbps, under Germany'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 format here is AAC, against a listing for Germany 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.

36 of Germany's entries are served from liveradio.swr.de, 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.