SWR $ Balladen

This is one of the quieter entries in Germany's listing, at 1114 of 1,409. Stations at this depth are usually community, religious or single genre broadcasters rather than national networks, and the country's numbered pages are the only route to them.

Two recorded opens in the public directory. That is a trace rather than a measurement, and it is the reason this page describes where the station sits rather than how popular it is.

The station's leading tag is 60er, shared with 13 other entries in Germany. It is a well populated tag here without being one of the country's defining ones, which is a common and unremarkable place for a station to sit.

The stream is 96 kbps where Germany'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 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.

The stream is served from d131.rndfnk.com, which no other entry in Germany uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.