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My amateur rig is a laptop running Traktor DJ Studio and a visualizer called G-Force. Traktor DJ is leaps and bounds ahead of any pro DJ software out there. It's a commercial package with anything a DJ or amateur could ever want. Beatmatching, streaming, looping, it's all there. It will even help you "work up" to a level of mastery until you go out and buy real turntables. G-Force is a great shareware app that will give a set-it-and-forget-it light show with nothing but an ordinary projector.

Finally, here's some advice from when I first started. Learning "how to DJ" involves three things you must master. First, learn the equipment, which isn't too tough if you're already an ubergeek. Second, get familiar with a whole spectrum of music, which can be hard if your tastes are polarized against genres like rap or country. Last, and most importantly, you must refine your skills to "work a crowd" and respond to your audience's tastes. Developing that charisma is by far the most challenging aspect of becoming a DJ.

[shameless plug] For more tips, I set up a pseudo-DJ tutorial at my website. [/shameless plug] Good luck.

That's an interesting program, but I still find full-screen G-FORCE + William Orbit, JS Bach, or Rachmaninoff to be most effective.

Ah, nostalgia! We used to play it in high school all the time, building masochistic tracks and challenging each other to finish. Speaking, look what I found in my video game closet :)

Maybe you should check out G-Force then...

iTunes is SoundJam

very true. and there were some undisclosed happenings going on between apple and andy o'meara with G-Force and the itunes visualizer. from reading the konfabulator message boards today, however, it looks like Arlo Rose found out about Dashboard from some friends and Apple NEVER approached him about buying Konfabulator. Arlo even says that Pixar has a site license for Konfabulator! so this time around it seems like apple dealt with 'borrowing' konfabulator in a very unscrupulous manner, to say the least...

What is the best software to use to create such a beast on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems?

For audio CDs, SoundForge formerly of Sonic Foundry, and now owned by Sony Pictures seems to be the industry favorite, and is generally considered the best multi-track audio sequencer around. Here is a review. You will also need Roxio or some other CD burning software to create the CD.

And conversely, has anyone used any of the music software on these platforms to actually analyze the contents of commercial subliminal CDs?

For that, you need some sampling software and some oscilloscope software. Talk to the DJ at your local club (the kind who has two decks and a microphone and a laptop). Your local DJ should be able to sample and analyze the CD for you, although it's not all that usefull... Audio signals layers get flattened to a single layer when burned to a CD, and it's difficult to separate the layers afterwords. That being said, we often times just used WinAmp to analyze audio signals. When analyzing audio spectrum, we would often run it through a video oscilloscope... Personally, I like to use G-Force as it's easy on the eyes and can analyze amplitude, frequency, and phase, at the same time. There are some software packages which people have written to try to seperate a flattened audio feed into seperate channels, although they usually don't work well (i.e. most of them are crap).

One common method of creating a "hidden message" is to write a short track and layer it inside the base by decreasing it's frequency and putting it below normal speaking range, down in the base range, with the drum beat. You can also take a message and put a white-noise mask over it, although signal loss is obviously a problem with that method. Obviously, you can also distort a message's temporal length, and make it veeerrrryyy sssllllloooowwww or vry fst. And you can also phase shift it, although that gets kinda weird.

A really good method for creating a good subliminal message, however, is to use symbolic messaging rather than embedded messaging. Basically, you separate your message into "chunks", and divide the chunks between different layers. As a somewhat silly example, which illustrates how this works, imagine that my subliminal message was "Impeach Bush". I would then chunk the message into "Impeach" and "Bush" obviously... Then I would sample two music clips, such as some dude saying the words "bush & beaver" and some chick singing the words "I'm just a wild peach". I'd loop the guy's sample to create one of those kinda annoying euro dance beats, and use the chick's sample as part of the refrain. If the refrain was sung three times throughout the song, and the last line to the refrain was "I'm just a wild peach", there would be three subliminal messages in the song, as the words transitioned from the girl saying "wild peach" to the guy saying "bush and beaver"... With the end effect of three subliminal messages in the CD approximating the impression "Impeach Bush".

By the way, there are a lot of twits on the slashdot forum today who are posting stuff like "subliminal messages are bullshit" and "subliminal messages don't work". I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center which is a demographics research center, and monitored things like commercials and subliminal messages. That was part of my job. Granted, we tended to concentrate on visual feeds, rather than auditory feeds. However, I can guarantee you that subliminal messages are extinsively used in communications. Often times, people create a subliminal message without even realizing it. Other times, they are sneakier and craft

Ooh yeah, http://soundspectrum.com/

Windows source code posted!!

Finally, Livio takes a shot at the idea that mathematics is a universal concept across the entire universe.

This seems like a tall, tall order. I've been into math/geometry/visual related software for years now and am now transitioning into making my living off it. However, the fact that there are still many fundamental mysteries in mathematics always raises doubt on the things like our origins, God, and the universe. Pi is the best example of that. It's no puzzle to me why countless minds have tried to be the hero (or the mathematician version of one), to unlock pi's mystery, but no one has yet to really break through. The film Pi is an excellent and enjoyable film, and considers the magnitude (as well as the price) of unlocking pi's mystery.

I'd like to day I'm open minded, but whew. Perhaps such things are more considerable when you start to consider all the various matter/energy theories floating around out there. There's still gigantic mysteries still out there for cosmology and physics (dark matter, open universe, dark energy, unification of gravity into the standard model), so I suppose we should never be too hasty to close the door on counterintuitive or far-fetched theories. I'd love to hear anyone who can paraphrase the thrust of this person's arguments, etc.