Metro FM

In South Africa's listing Metro FM lands at 22 of 100, which puts it on the first or second page of the country hub rather than in its tail.

The directory records no language for Metro FM. That gap is common and it is upstream of this site: broadcasters fill the field or they do not, and roughly a third of the stations with pages here have left it empty. It means the station appears on its country hub and not on any language shelf, which is the one place the omission costs it.

Metro FM streams at 48 kbps against South Africa's median of 128, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 47% of stations reach 128 kbps, a rate this low stands out, and it usually means either a speech station that never needed more or an encoder that has not been touched in years.

The audio comes from playerservices.streamtheworld.com, and 9 other stations in South Africa are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of South Africa's listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.