damu_89 I guess the synth voices weren't producing audio for you without it? I
I don't know, I was not actually listening to the output (because it's above 100% CPU!). I was just doing the number crunching in a tight loop and measured that it took about 14.5 seconds to generate 10 seconds of audio, from which I inferred the ~ 150% CPU load. I tried again with zexy and the result doesn't change much.
damu_89 My other question is this. I've seen people use beaglebone black with the Bela cape. Could I do that to get a bit more CPU power or will it still be the same?
The Bela cape only works in combination with the BeagleBone Black(BBB) and it doesn't have any processing capabilities onboard. Before the end of the summer it should also work with a BeagleBone AI(BBAI), which is more powerful. Pd performance on BBAI at full CPU should be about 8x what you'd get on BBB. I am actually surprised that the Mac vs Bela CPU ratio is only 10 to 1 as this would seem to indicate ... I guess that's not too bad!
damu_89 Might it also help the cpu load if I compiled some parts of the patch into externals and loaded them that wayt?
That could potentially help if done properly, but also it could be a lot of work (it involves rewriting your code in C!) 🙂