The Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco was swarming with the best and brightest musicians, programmers, investors, journalists and music tech geeks in the business today at the 10th SF MusicTech Summit.

Some of the coolest stuff we saw came from the recent Music Hack Day winners, including Aaron Leese’s new VST/AU plug-in, Cloud Browser, which brings the power of the cloud into your favorite DAW. Cloud Browser lets you drag and drop content from SoundCloud, iTunes and other sources right into your mix. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of integration on the music production side.

There was also a lot of innovation in the realm of music education technology, including the Jammit app, released about three months ago, which helps you learn new songs with original master tracks from top artists. The app allows you to mute, slow down and loop different tracks so you can practice your instrument with your favorite songs. It’s like a modern version of a method book.

Robert Sanchez was walking around the conference with his flashing, blinking prototype Tabber guitar. The Tabber uses a mobile app to control LEDs in the neck that can be used for flashy light shows or even educational purposes like displaying scales.

Mobile/web apps and services like Mowgli Games’ new music production Facebook game, Songster, which looks a lot more exciting than harvesting crops, were definitely a strong focus of the conference.

The conference was jam packed with panel discussions, demos and even some performances on rare wind instruments, but overall, SF MusicTech Summit was just a wonderful way to get a bunch of great minds together in one place. I can’t wait to see what kind of innovation comes out of it throughout the next year.

Check out more photos from SF MusicTech Summit on our Flickr page.