Having tried the AKAI EIE and suffering various glitches I went for the Focusrite Scarlet 2i4...no glitches for this but crashed the PC every time I hit stop on my sequencer . Focusrite and myself tried lots of things to solve the problem but eventually I lost confidence in it and sent it back.

PC is dedicated audio recently commissioned new and is fairly high spec and set up for audio by the computer shop.
Sequencer is Sonar 7 Producer...old but I am totally happy with it.

I have fond memories of my old EMU card of a few years ago..never a problem with it and Cakewalk.

I am recording a modular synth and nothing else...multi tracking. No vocals ..nothing live. Just one synth via midi one track at a time.
I don't need any USB peripherals.

Would the EMU 0404 PCI e internal soundcard suffice for my needs...? I checked the motherboard which has various PCI slots.
I'm not after top level quality...16 bit is fine for me.

(Sorry ..I may have posted this in the wrong section?)

Motherboard and USB specific system level drivers might help.

I agree. Also hope you keep windows update up to date.
If you are having all these problems it might be worth considering backing up, formatting and doing a clean windows install. Saffires are very reliable.

The motherboard is Gigabyte ultra durable B75m HD3

USB is 2.0 and 3.0

Rarecomponent123
The motherboard is Gigabyte ultra durable B75m HD3
USB is 2.0 and 3.0

Update motherboard BIOS from supplier, and then  go here:
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect
 

Thanks. ...it's windows 7 ..premium....installed new in March..never connected to Internet . The PC is set up for optimum audio

I didn't want to connect to the web on this music PC but I will if this could be the problem ..is this likely to be the cause of the faults ? Drivers not up to date ?

Quick question, do you have onboard Realtek HD and monitors that will plug into it? If you are recording no audio (this is very important), you can actually use the onboard chip in WDM mode. It must be run in 16-bit for this, and on my machine the buffer slider set at 2.0ms is all that really works.
 
Be sure in Windows sound card properties that the default properties for that chip are set to your project properties. And I have also had issues when a browser (or other application) was already open before SONAR (i.e. SONAR cannot use the device).
 
Edit: Wow, 4 posts while I was checking/typing this. Driver updates are definitely recommended, both for Windows, and any connected hardware.

Oh and please don't say you have ASIO4ALL :)

I ran the AKai on MME 32 then got th asio4 all working...but it stutters and there's audio glitches all the time..it's driving me nuts...as I said the old EMu was trouble free ..always.
With the Scarlet 2i4 it simply crashed my system every time...it was def something to do with their drivers.