Imagine the Apple TV as live music and visual instrument, and not just a way of watching archived Battlestar Galactica? Our friend Jeff Gambera has been busy hacking his Apple TV for just such unusual purposes. He’s gotten the real-time audio and music workstation Ableton Live working; even the demo song runs. (Plenty of people use Ableton Live with equal or lesser hardware; the aTV should easily beat many older G4s.)

This is big news for one primary reason: it means the Apple TV is capable handling multi-channel audio with real-time virtual instruments and time stretching. That makes the ATV a reasonable live music, DJ, sound art, or (once Quartz Composer and Max/MSP/Jitter and VDMX and Modul8 and such are running) live visuals. With networked music and sound and input from MIDI devices and alternative controllers just behind, this gets all the more interesting. Sure, a cheap PC could do the same — but it’s tough to find a $300 Mac this portable, let alone one that does all the Apple TV does. And, besides, it’s cool that someone’s got it working even as a gimmick.

First, some shaky video:

Of course, it’s a little hard to follow from the video what’s going on, so I convinced Jeff to write up some instructions. Check out the generic Apple TV hacking instructions first, but then you can follow how to make Ableton work. I also spoke to Jeff about some more advanced possibilities with the Apple TV; more on that after the break.

“AbletonTV” How-To:

This process invalidates your warranty on aTV. Please refer to wiki.awkwardtv.org for precise details regarding your aTV and the steps needed to get to the point you can run applications.

Summary: The Basic Concept

Enable SSH
Patch the kernel for USB
Mount drive read/write
Remove watchdog
Replace the Finder.app

Once these steps have been completed, you can run many OS X applications on the device.

An anonymous reader has Ableton Live running successfully on Apple TV — yes, Apple TV the actual hardware. If you haven’t been watching the Mac blogs, the Apple TV is in fact a mini computer and hackers are all over it. Suddenly, what looked like somewhat bland hardware may become more popular because of hackers. Will you soon be carrying Apple TV’s to a gig? We’re waiting on our tipster to provide some more screen grabs and video with details, but in the meantime, here’s a snapshot (viewed from another Mac remotely).

More on Apple TV hacking:
Apple TV boots from USB (without opening case) [ AwkwardTV, which has some other good hacking information ]
AppleTVhacks.net