Radio Liepāja

Language and country do not match up the obvious way here. Radio Liepāja transmits from Latvia, where Latvian leads the listing, and broadcasts in English, which five of the country's stations use.

The English shelf on this site collects every station in the language regardless of where it transmits from, and the directory's English entries are concentrated in United States, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom. Reading the shelf next to this page is the quickest way to see how far the language's dial actually reaches.

At 128000 kbps, Radio Liepāja streams at more than double Latvia's median of 128 kbps. That is a deliberate choice by whoever runs it: bandwidth is the recurring cost of an internet station, and a rate this far above the local norm is money spent on sounding better than the dial around it.

Radio Liepāja streams in MP4 rather than the AAC that most of Latvia's dial uses. Uncommon codecs are worth noticing for a practical reason as well as a nerdy one: browser support for them is thinner than for MP3 and AAC.

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.