Radio Gaana

In India's listing Radio Gaana lands at 24 of 565, which puts it on the first or second page of the country hub rather than in its tail.

The directory counts 93 opens against this stream. That is well above India's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

Radio Gaana streams at 104 kbps, under India'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.

Radio Gaana 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.

Its audio comes straight from sp14.instainternet.com, an address unique to this entry in India's listing. That is the simplest case there is, and it is the one where pressing play tells you the whole truth about whether the station is on air.