playback stutters while loading soundfiles into buffer

hi all

i have a simple player/looper/scrubber patch that has four instances of a groove~ & buffer~ based soundfile player.

i'm using 24/96 soundfiles of a few minutes each, and i'm getting stuttering in the playback when i have, for example, two players playing while i'm loading a new file into another player.

according to activity monitor, max is using less than 2gb of my 4gb total memory, but it says max becomes "unresponsive" momentarily when loading a sample, and that's when the glitches start happening.

shouldn't this be possible without the stutters? it's important to me to be able to play one file while loading another one into one of the other players, and i feel like i'm well within the boundaries of what my RAM should allow.

i know 24/96 is very hi-res, and might be considered overkill for a live performance patch, but this allows me to slow down the files significantly without degrading the sound quality.. so i'd prefer not to go down to a safer 44.1/16 or something like that.

would any of you have any tips on how to solve this?

thank you VERY much in advance!