New soundcard (Presonus Audiobox USB) won't record through Sonar 8.5

More info please.

Computer OS.... version of the cake product.... 

I've heard that firewire is going away and USB seems to be the enduring standard... for now. 

The Presonus will work, you just gotta get it set up right. 

If you can hear other things playing thorough the Presonus, you know it works.  

Can you hear PLAYBACK of your Cakewalk product through the presonus? If so, you simply have some setting not set properly or levels are down in the chain. 

I also notice that from time to time, something in my recording rig gets ..... "misdirected" and I get no input from my Saffire interface. I can hear playback just fine BUT... my meter indicates nothing, I get flat line recordings and looking at the settings, they are all correct. 

I re-boot the computer after a total shutdown. Computer & interface. After the restart, communication is restored and it works again. Be sure to try that.... fresh cold boot when in doubt. 

The other day, after doing all that... I had just deleted 2 envelopes and then edited a track to move one clip to the second track..... I was getting no sound from the second track after dragging the clip in. Not just the clip but the whole track wasn't playing.  After a reboot (cold) it still didn't work but I could hear the other tracks just fine..... I discovered that the clip had the volume pulled all the way down..... sometimes it;s just the simple things. 

With some interfaces the only option to record "what you hear" is to patch the output back to the input (with some short cables,) Make sure to kill input monitoring to avoid nasty feedback loop.

PRESONAS firestudio project

Oh, it won't work, it's firewire. None of the new PCs are coming out with firewire! They are USB only, it really sucks.

the pc keeps saying my presonus box is un able too hook up to the sonar x3 program??

For whatever the worth, I have a Presonus AudioBox 1818VSL audio interface, BUT I do not have the Windows default audio device set to use it.  You may be able to have it set to your interface, but I have had conflicts in the past doing that, so instead have opted to have only music applications such as Sonar actually point to the ASIO drivers of the interface.
 
When I DO want to record something like a song from YouTube, what I do is to use one of a number of freeware video download programs that are out there (I happen to use YTD Video Downloader), and it lets me download videos from YouTube and save them on my computer.
 
Then, also contained in the YTD Video Downloader software, is functionality to convert the downloaded video clip into wave or MP3 format, which I do.
 
Then, I am able to simply import the MP3 or wave file into an audio track in Sonar, and then I can do whatever I want in Sonar with that imported audio.
 
It isn't the same approach that you seek, but it DOES get the job done, and does so in better audio quality than the approach of sending the song through the interface with a cable loop.
 
By the way, I use an HDTV as my display monitor, and connect to it from my computer with an HDMI cable.  THIS is what I have my Windows default audio device set to, since the HDTV has built-in speakers.
 
Bob Bone