SWR 4 RP Mainz (128k)

In Germany's ordering this is number 563 of 1,409, 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 language field is empty for this entry. It is left empty here too rather than filled from the country, because the shelves on this site are only worth using if what is on them was actually declared.

The stream runs at 128 kbps, level with Germany's median. Bitrate stops being interesting once a station is at the local norm, and the useful question moves on to whether the stream stays up, which no snapshot can answer.

The stream address on this entry points at liveradio.swr.de, which is where 35 other stations in Germany 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.

Their site is liveradio.swr.de, a domain registered in Germany. Where a station's own address and its listed country agree, the entry is a little more trustworthy than one where they do not.

Of everything the directory lists in Germany, the entry this page reads closest to is hr2-kultur 128kb mp3, so it is worth setting out what separates the two. The number each one is named for is the difference between them: one hundred and twenty-eight here and three there. They are filed in different parts of the country: this one under Rheinland-Pfalz, that one under Hessen. The two streams are served from different addresses, liveradio.swr.de for this one and dispatcher.rndfnk.com for the other. The other entry carries the classical music and jazz tags and this one does not. The broadcasters publish at different addresses of their own, liveradio.swr.de and hr2.de.