glitches and random skipping starting/stopping playback

I have a new Lenovo p51s with 32 GB ram running Ubuntu 16.04.
Audacity v2.1.2.

I am having trouble playing back audio. The issue is hard to explain, but I will attempt to do so. It happens on multiple different audio files, and multiple types of audio files.

Initially starting an audio file is fine. If I stop and then start the audio again, it has this glitch (like a very short static sound) followed by a jump of 1-10 seconds then starts playing again.
If I stop and start a few more times, it gets worse, to the point that it just glitches and stops playing altogether. I will have to hit play several times.
This is especially noticeable when a specific section of audio is selected, and I’m trying to play it in a loop. The entire audio plays once, I hit play to play it again, and it skips all around, glitches a lot, and sometimes just doesn’t play anything (except a quick glitch).