Random audio skipping, and high load average

[Schwarzer Kater]

Is there a way to perhaps raise the priority of pulseaudio?

The following is what I stumbled on by chance and it is just theory - I have never used or played around with this myself (!):

You could start KSysGuard and search for pulseaudio. With [F8] or right click on it you can set priority.

[Red Squirrel]

This SEEMS to have fixed itself. Maybe it was the last update, I'm not sure. My load average also seems lower. I actually saw it go below 1 for the first time since I installed and I don't get skips anymore. Kind of early to tell though... but it's promising. A good way to reproduce it was going on Facebook since that site is super bloated. Refreshing it was almost guaranteed to cause a skip to happen.