88.5 WRAS FM GPB

Position 478 of 1,481 puts this station in the middle of the United States' directory presence. The middle is worth browsing precisely because the ordering has stopped sorting by fame and has not yet stopped sorting at all.

Three recorded opens in the public directory. That is a trace rather than a measurement, and it is the reason this page describes where the station sits rather than how popular it is.

No language is recorded against this station. The field is optional in the public directory and a great many entries skip it, so an empty language says nothing about what you will hear when you press play. It does keep the station off the language shelves, since a shelf built on guesses would be worse than a shelf with holes.

At 256 kbps, 88.5 WRAS FM GPB streams at more than double the United States' 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.

Its audio comes straight from gpb.streamguys1.com, an address unique to this entry in the United States' 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.