Sonar le and cakewalk sound center.

Make sure the output of the MIDI track you're recording into or mousing into is set to the soft synth.
Make sure the output of the soft synth is set to a valid output. For instance, if it's set to your S/PDIF output and nothing is plugged in there, you won't hear anything.
Is there movement in the soft synth track's meters?
For the record, you don't record the soft synth's sound; the MIDI track is what's recorded and that MIDI information is played through the audio output of the soft synth.
To permanently 'record' that audio output, you have to Bounce the synth to an audio track.
Welcome to the forum.

Ben - what do you mean by "changing the format of the music"--? RB

If the MIDI and synth tracks are included in the export, then yes the synths will be in the song. You have to select all the tracks in the song that you want to export.
That will 'bounce' the synths to audio along with the rest of the selected tracks.

This is probably the wrong place to post, but I see SONAR LE & Cakewalk Sound Center and those are what I started with and what gave me the problems. I had Sonar LE & CSC loaded from a bundled disc, and then loaded X1 Producer + Expansion etc onto the same machine, 64bit. I then bought the Digital Sound Factory Guitars expansion pack for CSC and although they (eventually) showed up in the browser the sounds wouldn't play. Finally, I tracked down an update to CSC in the Sound Creator 5 page at CW - installed that, and everything's working a-okay. Just thought I let anyone knows who may have the same probs. 8-)