Mellow Mountain Radio

Mellow Mountain Radio is deep in the United Kingdom's listing, at 389 of 466. 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.

The stream is encoded at 1114 kbps, more than twice the 128 kbps median for the United Kingdom. Bitrate is the one quality figure the public directory carries, and on this entry it is unambiguous.

Mellow Mountain Radio streams in AACH264 rather than the MP3 that most of the United Kingdom'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.

Mellow Mountain Radio publishes an HLS stream. That is a modern and perfectly good way to broadcast, and it is also why the button on this page may not start it: HLS needs a player that can read a playlist and fetch segments, which a browser audio tag does not do on its own.

Its audio comes straight from owncast.mellowmountainradio.com, an address unique to this entry in the United Kingdom'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.