Radio Parma

Radio Parma sits in the tail of Italy's 400 entries. The tail is the part of a directory that goes missing first, and it is the part worth keeping: the head of every country's list is the same handful of national broadcasters, and everything that makes a dial local is behind them.

Talk & speech is the station's own leading tag and no other entry in Italy uses it that way. Worth reading as self-description: the directory takes tags as broadcasters type them and does not reconcile them.

At 64 kbps this is one of the lowest rate streams on Italy's dial, whose median is 128 kbps. It will hold a connection almost anywhere, which is the tradeoff being made.

Where Italy's stations mostly use MP3, this one uses AAC. Worth a line only because it is a difference, and because the country page's format breakdown is one of the quicker ways to see which providers a national dial runs on.

Its audio comes straight from ice05.fluidstream.net, an address unique to this entry in Italy'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.