Radio Perugia

Among the 400 stations in Italy with pages, Radio Perugia is around the halfway mark. Anything in this stretch is reachable from the country's numbered pages rather than from its front table, which is why those pages exist.

The gap here is large: 64 kbps where Italy'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.

Radio Perugia streams in AAC+ while most of Italy'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 voice.webradio.bz, 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.

The station's site is at radioperugia.eu, which sits under the .eu country domain rather than Italy's. That mismatch is usually mundane, a host or a parent organisation registered elsewhere, and it is the kind of small inconsistency worth seeing rather than smoothing over.