Garage Band audio engine can't process audio data on a 2016 16gb macbook pro with 500GB SSD

Should this be happening? I am attempting to run Garage Band at the same time as a few other applications in order to record tutorials, but it seems to me like this computer with this amount of memory should be able to handle it.

I'm usually running Garage Band, Terminal, VSCode and Chrome. Sometimes I have Docker containers running also, but even after stopping all containers and cleaning up any dangling/unused containers and volumes, this still happens. The machine also seems to be working very hard a lot of the time when installing/downloading with npm or git, even without garage band running. Storage on the machine is 137GB remaining out of 500GB.

I've looked at Activity monitor while garage band is open and it nothing seems to be using an insane amount of CPU. How else can I debug this?

Is this just too much for the system to handle?