Hi. I was hoping someone could help me out. i just purchased a alesis qx25 midi controller. When I bring up a midi track in cakewalk sonar 8.5 producer edition and put all the infoi in such as input and output and channel, etc. the meters are going up when I play the controller but there is no sound. I have a m audio 24/192 card and it plays fine in audio tracks and .mp3 and .wavs. What am I doing wrong? First time midi user.

The MIDI track gets the data from the QX25, the output is set to a softsynth and an audio track takes the output of the softsynth. It is the audio track that actually produces the sound. You may want to take a look at tutorial #4 in the documentation. It covers basic MIDI use.

Yep, although you are sending midi data to the midi track, you still have to have a synth or other instrument that the midi track can play in order to create sound. scook's recommendation to read tutorial 4 should get you up and running.

Hi. Thank you both for your posts. I have sound now when I open a software instrument but what I'm wondering now is how to use all the general midi sounds like strings, etc. Does my midi controller have to support general midi? How can I access these sounds? Thank you so much.

Try using the TTS-1 soft synth for GM sounds although you may find better strings in Dimension Pro.

And as a small aside: what you are seeing on your meter in the MIDI channel is that data is received (the red clipping area), the bar represents velocity.

As said, start with the TTS-1 for GM set ups. There is a 16 channel GUI mixer and you can select from all the sounds and banks for 100's of sounds, You can add efxs and minor editing too. 
To have more then one instrument you need to assign a channel to each instruments track and then assign an instrument. Channel 10 is normally for drums. You can use the properties menu, right click the track info area in track view. 

Yes - someone mentioned better  strings in Dimension Pro. Is this part of stock cakewalk sonar producer edition 8.5? If not where can I find it and also where can I find some really cool software instruments? Can you add them into Cakewalk if they're not there already? Just trying to make the best possible sounds available Thank you guys so much.

DimPro is included with Producer. The installer is a separate disk.

Well arguably the best sounds possible are real instruments, Second best is from a proper sample library which are not free, third is the multitude of free stuff easily found on the net. Try KVR for a starters.