Recordings on playback choppy, skipping

21.5-inch iMac
OSX 10.9.4
Audacity 2.0.6

Had a horrible skipping problem after years of trouble free use with older Audacity. I tried everything including slowing the sampling rate to 16 bit but nothing worked. Then saw this post and changed the buffer to 50 and the skipping was gone, but there was still a faint rhythmic click like every few seconds. So I lowered it to 30 and it seems that problem is gone, too. Thanks!