The Groovy Smooth Jazz Station

The Groovy Smooth Jazz Station is deep in the United Arab Emirates' listing, at 283 of 328. Down here the ordering barely orders anything: the difference between one position and the next is often a single recorded open, so treat the neighbours below as a shelf rather than as a ranking.

Two stations in the United Arab Emirates lead with the tag smooth jazz, and The Groovy Smooth Jazz Station is one of them. That is a small enough group to hear end to end, and the tags are the broadcasters' own words rather than a classification imposed here.

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

The Groovy Smooth Jazz Station streams in AAC while almost all of the United Arab Emirates' 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 from jazz.streeemer.com, which no other entry in the United Arab Emirates uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.