Groove Salad 2 (256k MP3)

Groove Salad 2 (256k MP3) ranks 226 among 1,481 stations in the United States. High enough that the country hub carries it in its own tables, and far enough from the head that the neighbours below are a genuinely different set of stations from the famous ones.

The station's leading tag is ambient, shared with 52 other entries in the United States. It is a well populated tag here without being one of the country's defining ones, which is a common and unremarkable place for a station to sit.

At 256 kbps, Groove Salad 2 (256k MP3) 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.

The stream address on this entry points at ice5.somafm.com, which is where 31 other stations in the United States are served from as well. Platforms of that size carry the long tail of a country's dial, and they are the reason a listing can look broken when it is one host having a quiet hour.

Groove Salad 2 (256k MP3) and SomaFM Doomed (256k MP3) are described by the directory in very nearly the same fields, which makes the differences between them worth stating rather than leaving to be inferred. They are filed in different parts of the country: this one under California, that one under San Francisco CA. The two streams are served from different addresses, ice5.somafm.com for this one and ice2.somafm.com for the other. The broadcaster tagged this entry chillout, downtempo and lounge, which the other entry is not tagged with. The other entry carries the dark and industrial tags and this one does not.