RDS Relax

Position 148 of 400 puts this station in the middle of Italy's directory presence. The middle is worth browsing precisely because the ordering has stopped sorting by fame and has not yet stopped sorting at all.

The open count against RDS Relax is four, which is enough to know the stream has been played through the directory and not enough to compare it with anything. Small counts are the normal case out here, and a ranking built from them separates stations by luck as much as by interest.

RDS Relax 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.

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.

The stream is served from stream.rds.radio, an address three other entries in Italy use as well. A small shared host is usually a group of stations under one owner or one technical provider rather than a platform.