Miami — The Remix Hotel event here this week during Winter Music
Conference provides "hands-on access to the technology and equipment
used to create today's electronic and urban music via artist
presentations and demonstrations, workshops, clinics and discussion."

Held at the Eden Roc Hotel in South beach and sponsored by Apple and
Guitar Center the event featured a ton of Mac hardware and software on
display (Garage Band, Logic, G5s and those sweet 30-inch Apple Studio
displays). What really impressed me was the vendor area on the lower
level that featured several rooms of equipment from the likes of
Mackie, Alesis, M-Audio, Ableton, Pioneer, Rane and Stanton. Your
fearless sunburnt editor fell in love with the new Mackie Firewire
mixer although I'm still partial to my Rane TTM56 and its patented
magnetic fader. Off to the Ultra Music Festival and Carry On… More on
those soon!

Ed: Watch for a full image gallery later this evening. It'll cheer me up here on a dreary day in New York! -PK

We start our live coverage from Miami's WMC (Winter Music Conference) — more reports through the
weekend and into next week! CDM's Eldorado is on the scene. -Ed.

Miami — One of the most interesting parts of the electronic music
revolution is the digital convergence. An industry once steeped in
vinyl is gradually turning to digital technology. At a panel "Art of
the DJ/Digital Mixing" DJs and producers discussed switching from
traditional analog equipment (turntables and a mixer) to digital
technologies (i.e. software). Panelists include: Greg "Stryker" Chin,
AJ Bertenshaw, DJ Skribble, Josh Gabriel, Jay Dabhi and Cyril Palacios.
Joe Vangeri was the moderator.

A lot of the panel discussion centered on turntables vs. digital music.
Some of the most interesting nuggets from the panel are that five out
of seven use Mac OS X. Josh Gabriel extolled the virtues of using
Ableton's Live and performs using only his PowerBook laying a
plexiglass panel over the turntables at the clubs because there's "not
even three inches of space for a laptop." Everyone agreed that the
capabilities of tools like Live and Final Scratch were worth the
initial investment in time to archive all your music.

Some of the tips from the session on archiving your vinyl to digital
included:

• Encode your vinyl in the highest bit rate you can. Most panelists
  preferred 320 kbps, but will work with a well-encoded 192 kbps file
  when necessary.
• When converting your vinyl it is imperative that you
  use good needles (club, DJ and scratch needles are all bad). Use an
  archival quality needle like the Stanton 890 FS. Bertenshaw,
  recommended the high-fidelity needles from Shure for around US$200.
• Encode using a good analog to digital (A>D) converter, not the
  built-in sound card in your PC. It all comes down to budget, with
  things like the Apogee converter at the high end.

The M3 Summit (Miami, Music, Multimedia) opens tomorrow at Winter Music Conference
in Miami, FL. The event (which is co-sponsored by Apple) bills itself
as "the only gathering in the United States to merge modern music,
technology, fashion, and multimedia arts as an integrated lifestyle."
On the bill are sunset sessions and poolside networking parties,
confirmed guests include John Legend (Thursday night), Cirque Du Soleil
Musique (Saturday night) and one of my personal favorites – Layo and
Bushwacka. I will be covering the event live from Miami for CDM and
look forward to bringing back reports on the latest in mobile DJ
technology. More soon…

Ed: Thanks, Eldorado; we'll be watching for the latest! -PK

CDM welcomes new contributor Liz who's going to allow us to live
vicariously through her and make believe we're in sunny south Florida. Here's the latest on the Ultra Music Festival lineup:

The lineup
for the seventh annual event, now an official Winter Music Conference
closing event, is unbelievable. Timo Maas is will be performing in the "Be Yourself" arena – Need I say
more? The Crystal Method will be back at Ultra for the first time since
their only Ultra appearance in 2002. Also on the Soundstage will be a
live set by Moby but I'm most looking forward to seeing Rabbit in the
Moon who kicked some major butt at Ultra 2004. Rabbit in the Moon will
not disappoint with their live performance art and electronic
originality.

The Miami Winter Music Conference has an enormously overwhelming line-up of events. InternetDJ has the scoop on which events to check out.

Here's what CDM sees as the big events:

• Remix Hotel should be fun again, and it's both chill and free.
• Wednesday BPM Magazine is hosting an all-female lineup — though we look forward to the day when gender balance and recognition doesn't segregate by gender any longer.
• Fatboy Slim will make an appearance Wednesday
• It is Miami, after all, so why not head poolside?
• Saturday is the big night
  (accurately called Ultra), with Paul Van Dyk / Tiesto, Crystal Method,
  Oakenfold, Danny Howells, Photek, and 100+ other artists, followed by
  an after-event with Sasha, Digweed, UNKLE, and more. (Breaking news from residentadvisor: Moby will be there, too.)

Trends this year: more professional events, bigger, huger, larger. Jason O'Grady will be there for CDM covering the action.

Miami is cool, but as an aside, wouldn't be great if the US had an
event for more underground and experimental electronic acts? WMC is
completely DJ-dominated.