NI Maschine not working as a VST

I'm having some trouble with NI Maschine as a vst plugin.
 
Maschine works perfectly as standalone, but when I fire it up (insert as softsynth) in a Sonar Project the sound is missing.
When I press the Maschine Mikro controller, the Maschine software responds. But no sound.
 
Also, when I insert the vst, the sound from the actual project also disappears.
 
the HW controller is Maschine Mikro, SW is Maschine 1.7.1 (i think) and Sonar is 8.5
 
I have the Tascam FW1884 as my soundcard, going via ASIO.
(I've tried to change to WDM drivers, same result)
 
Anyone?

is it midi controlled?  do you have your midi in routed to that track. I have  checked out some NI stuff and its way too much putzing under the hood with those synths. I mean REaktor you're starting from Scratch Absynth... whatever you have to do to get sound out of those patches you have to play around with it too. I think if you keep at it you'll get it. I haven't checked out Maschine. 
  Kontakt and Kompakt are just sample players at least... that get you into the orchestra.  But there are lots of sample players and synths that plug in and do a lot of stuff. Good luck with NI. I guess they're good, but if you're not making music you're going to be getting really into tech stuff.