Just a thought here, I play music on my 'puter all the time while running everything I need to work, usually about a dozen programs.

I would get stuttering in the audio every time Winders decided to go off on a HDD thrash because of indexing. Indexing would also randomly tie up my 'puter for 30 seconds at the exact moment I had someone on the phone needing to know something...

Turning off indexing cured these woes. I didn't turn off the service, just disallow indexing on all the HDDs.