I am starting to have what appears to be major problems with my Gina 3G soundcard. Issues are both somewhat random, and with some patterns:
Any large template (10 gigs +) when used is prone to quickly degenerate with fits of major extended digitial noise (more than just the occasional pop or click). Any given sample may completely break apart. Small templates (6 gigs and under) seem to continue to function ok. Any track in the large templates can be part of the problem, the issues don't seem to be limited to a particular hard drive or sample files. Note that the large templates, on occasion, might sometimes more or less function.
I am rather at a loss what else to test or how to go about resolving this. I suspect that the problems may have started when one of my hard drives failed (at the time I was working on projects that did not access that drive, so it was awhile before I realized it had failed). It is only in the last couple of days that I resumed working with a large template, so the issue had likely remained hidden.
While problems are most likely to occur in dense sections, they may also occur in soft passages, or at times when there is minimal disk streaming going on. A sudden hard attack may also cause a problem. Note that at no point are any of the meters within either MIR SE or in the Gina sound panel anywhere close to clipping. Even if peaks occur in the -25 db range, problems will still occur.
Specs: i7 930, 24 gigs of ram, Windows 7, and a Gina 3G soundcard. Note that Echo has not updated their drivers in a very long time. That card may well be the problem, but, prior to the hard drive failure everything was working fine. Also, it appears at this point that problems are not unknown with that card in Windows 7.
Any suggestions any of you might have on where to go from here, would be greatly appreciated. I am largely stuck until this gets sorted out.
A new sound card might well be in order, but I don't want to spend any money for one unless I am certain that doing so will indeed fix the issue(s).