Reply to Traktor load reaches max periodically and crackles music

I'm on a 1.7Ghz (2.4 with turbo boost) core i5 with 4 gb ram (the new Lenovo Yoga) and when I hook up my audio 2 the CPU load meter on traktor goes all the way up for about 2-3 minutes and this makes the music crackle up. After a couple of minutes it comes back down and everything works fine, and an hour or so later this whole thing happens again.

Really frustrating when this happens in the middle of a set. What can I do to fix this?