NI Studio Drummer glitches?

[eric22rr]

I'm having the pops and cracks with my audio when using Studio Drummer.

I've done quite a bit of research on this, but I still need some clarification on how to make this work. I'm going to keep this as short and specific as I can.


My setup:
Digi 002R
Mac Pro Early 2008
2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Xeon (8 cores total)
6 GB RAM
Mountain Lion 10.8.2
*Live and Studio Drummer apps are installed on the system drive, the S.D. library is stored on an different drive reserved for all of my audio.
*Alesis USB drum kit with TriggerIO

Ableton Live 8.3.4 (NOT the 64-bit Beta that's out)
NI Studio Drummer and Live are installed on the system drive


1) Should I move my SD library back to the system drive? I assumed it would be better on a secondary audio drive, to free up work for the system drive, but I'm not sure if this is a bad move with respect to performance.

2) When I run Activity Monitor, it doesn't indicate that I'm running low on Memory. Would I benefit from more RAM, even though this is the case?

3) I have the ability to support multi-core processing within the Live settings, as well as the Kontakt AU plugin settings, with Kontakt running as an AU plugin. What combination of multi-core processing should I select to get maximum performance? Turn it on in Live, but disable it in Kontakt/SD?

4) My Mac supports 64-bit processing. Should I upgrade to the Live 64-bit beta?

5) In Live prefs, what should I set the CPU Usage Simulator percentage to?

6) I'm assuming I should start with a low buffer size and high sample rate, check for glitches/pops, then gradually increase these settings. Based on my setup, what should I start out with, and how should I go about doing this?

I've tried disabling the effects in SD and using only the lite versions of the kits, but it's still not doing much to improve performance.

I know a lot of these questions have been touched on in forum posts for NI and Live, but I'm still at a loss.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!