With most presets, I find a crackling sound happening during performing/playback. I wouldn’t be too annoyed with this but I find even if I mixdown songs, the crackling is still apparent. Any way to fix this? I’m running a fairly old mac, 2014, so I’m assuming that plays into it.
What do you have your sample buffer set to in your DAW?
I’m running GarageBand, so whatever the default for that is. I read that you can’t change the buffer on the most recent versions 
Yeah, unfortunately they remove this feature in GarageBand since version 11, so you won’t be able to adjust the buffer size. Maybe you could try to check ANA 2 settings and check if HD waveforms is enabled ( it should be ON by default ) and uncheck this option to use SD waveforms that might help CPU load, but I’m not sure it will have an impact on GarageBand buffer load.
An option to check in GarageBand is the Audio quality in advance settings, you may want to try to set it to “best” when rendering your audio, but IMO you don’t have many options in this scenario since you can’t adjust the buffer size.
Not sure it’s related to your Mac performances, more a GarageBand issue here I think, maybe you want to give a try to another DAW to test this, Tracktion makes a free version of their Waveform Sequencer, you’ll have control on the buffer size in this one.
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There’ also other free solutions for DAW by the way, check this article from the guys at Music Tech