Hi @DaanVA
I ran into the same wall, and I found the Bela Gem Multi, which has 10 input and 10 output channels and also runs on the Xenomai kernel.
I am currently working on a reggae preamp project that uses Sushi-as-a-library in a Bela code project, and I am having great levels of success.
I have it running at bufsize 32 @48KHz and after quite a bit of perf-hunting, porting all my JUCE code to DPF for a lighter memory footprint, optimizing my DSP code to use fastmath and NEON SIMD vectorization where applicable, stripping off unused features of my plugins for the product, and most importantly tuning the system to use 3 Twine EVL workers on separate cores, I’ve managed to have almost no underruns (only 2/minute) with this enormous config :
- 15 VST3 instances, including a 4-band compressor, a sample player, a double stereo echo, a granular delay, and a quite overkill saturation plugin (the rest are lightweight channel strips and eqs)
- 32 internal sushi plugin instances, including 23 sends, 5 returns, 2 freeverb and 2 gain plugins
This is pushing the bela to its limits and I am having quite a blast optimizing everything I can to basically cram GTA5 in a gameboy color lmao.
I am using Claude Code to help me on these optimization tasks. I already had made all the plugins and sushi config on my Pi 4 and wanted to move to a platform with more I/O, like you.
The Bela is based on the PocketBeagle2 which is quite underpowered compared to the Pi 4, which does make the dev cycle a bit slower, for example it doesn’t meet the requirements to build sushi, so I’ve made a docker image that is inspired by the ELK one to crossbuild Sushi, JUCE plugins and DPF plugins for the PocketBeagle2.
I plan on making everything open source ASAP, I still have a bit of cleaning to do and fix several scripts and I will publish it for you guys.
If you can’t wait for me to release, hit me up.
Cheers !