Games - Ormgas

	Games - Ormgas

Ormgas is an internet radio station which streams all the music which is available from Overclocked Remix, Ormgas' playlist also contains all the episodes of a radio show called VG Frequency which is hosted by Larry Oji (also known as Liontamer).

History

Ormgas was initally founded sometime in winter 2002 by ravon. Back then, the only face Ormgas had was a simple status page by Icecast (the streaming server). It contained the currently playing song, listener account and some other miscellaneous information. The page remained in this fashion for well over a year, as it was mainly used by ravon and his co-workers. On the 15th of January, ravon decided to switch to the e107 (software) content management system. The new CMS contained things like a chatbox, a forum, the ability to post news, and several other features. For many this is considered the birth of what is now known as Ormgas.

From the beginning, ravon wanted Ormgas to have something Overclocked Remix was lacking -- the ability to vote on the Overclocked Remixes. With the e107, this was now possible, and in a short time it was possible to vote on the songs that were playing on the stream. Thus the was born. Of course, ravon had predicted that the popularity of the site was going to grow, so he got some people to help him out. The following descriptions are taken from the Ormgas FAQ.

"AyakoKiyomizu: Song metadata editor, mascot, ravon's Ragnarok Online partner-in-crime

Blue: Former moderator, endless spring of new ideas (currently reported missing)

Liontamer: all-knowing OCR judge, VG Frequency radio host, forum moderator, Sceen.org columnist

Maniro: High-quality webstream mirrorer, Canadian code monkey, mysterious benefactor, handler of rabid dogs

Omega Xi: Forum master, aspiring tracker & electronic musician, British but not understated

w-ber: Background perl scripter, playlist handler, wormgas (IRC bot) coder, passive forum moderator, Finnish dynamo"

In early April 2004, the IRC channels #ormgas and #ormgas.chat were created. #ormgas.chat is actually a live feed from the main page's chatbox so users can respond quickly and easily to posts made there. w-ber concocted wormgas, the IRC bot, so that users could check the currently playing song within the IRC chat. wormgas is an IRC bot that can inform the users of the currently playing track, check what is coming up in the stream queue, and even allow the users to vote on the songs from within IRC, among many other functions. Wormgas can also interact with the users and is as much a character of Ormgas as any of the site's administration. At around this same time, Ormgas started to use the Peercast Protocol alongside the the three main streams so that more people could listen to the stream at once. However, Peercast was (and still is) undergoing development, so it caused more problems than it solved, as a result Ormgas no longer supports it. In August 2004, djpretzel added a live advertisment for Ormgas on the front page of Overclocked Remix, and the member count increased by an incredible amount.

Later in that year, a major change occurred at Ormgas. The stream, which had previously been in Mp3 format, was switched to Vorbis. w-ber had this to say about the changeover:

"From the beginning we streamed in MP3, because of several reasons. 1) It's what most other stations do and virtually all computers are able to play MP3 audio 2) It was the only format our streamer application, IceS, supported 3) The source material was in MP3 format

The last reason was a bit contradictory, as we encoded all streams, not just the lower than 128 kbit/s. The idea of Ogg Vorbis streaming was first tossed around in spring, but no-one had time or skill to code a new streamer. The opportunity presented itself in late autumn when I started working on my own streamer application. However, after a few weeks of banging my head against buffering problems I concluded it's best to hack it in the current application, which, as you see, works nicely (apart from random crashes which I hope to fix in early 2005).

Let's review the reasons for switching to Ogg Vorbis. 1) It's a free and open format, unlike MP3 whose patent holder is Fraunhover, Inc. 2) It's especially designed for streaming and therefore doesn't need so much bandwidth 3) It sounds so much better."

The Stream

The stream plays every Overclocked Remix song once, which gives each song equal airtime. However, new Overclocked Remixes are played three times soon after their release so that users have more of an opportunity to vote on them. At the end of each cycle of the playlist, an episode of VG Frequency is played.

Currently there are three streams, a 32 kbit/s stream, a 56 kbit/s stream (both of which are hosted by ravon), and an 80 kbit/s stream hosted on Mediacast1 which is paid for by donations made by the users.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Ormgas ]

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