hindiretro

At position 514 of 565, this is one of the stations in India that almost nobody arrives at by browsing. That is the case for having a page at all. A station reachable only by knowing its name is a station most directories lose.

The gap here is large: 64 kbps where India's stations typically run 128. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

hindiretro streams in AAC+ while most of India's dial is MP3. Codec choice is mostly invisible to a listener, and it is one of the clearest fingerprints of which hosting provider a station uses, since providers default their customers into a format and few customers ever change it.

The stream is served as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.

Its audio comes from mirchiplaylive.akamaized.net. One other station in India streams from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.

hindiretro and Akashvani Asmita Vahini FM are described by the directory in very nearly the same fields, which makes the differences between them worth stating rather than leaving to be inferred. The two streams are served from different addresses, mirchiplaylive.akamaized.net for this one and airhlspush.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com for the other. The directory puts this stream at sixty-four kilobits and the other at thirty-two.