After I shared that image, I realized I was getting stereo and that was odd. Then your comment made me think about it more, and I realized I never installed a proper driver for my interface (cheapo behringer um2), since it had been working for me right out of the box (again, no issues in other software, and I was getting audio into cakewalk, albeit with the volume issue). SO. I thought perhaps the driver might have had something to do with it, since I didn't even have an option to switch to mono. This lead me on a long morning of tragedy and regret. LOL.
I went to to behringer's site and they linked to AISO4ALL as the driver to use with this interface. So. Installed that, set it up in cakewalk, and got no audio whatsoever, no matter how hard I tried. Learned about an older behringer specific driver so I thought i'd give that a whirl. Uninstalled AISO4ALL, installed the new driver.... same thing, no audio no matter what I tried, and cakewalk ran like crap while it was installed. Attempts to record in other software showed I could not get audio there anymore either. Great.
So I uninstalled THAT. After that my computer decided to stop powering the interface. Unplugged re-plugged.... no power. Put it on another machine. Powered up. WHAT?!?? did some research and found that I needed to completely remove it with the device manager. Then when I plugged it back in. Worked, as in powered on, but still no audio in cakewalk. Futzed about with the driver settings to try and get back to where I had started, and eventually got the audio working again, and this time I'm somehow able to get it as a mono input. However, the volume issue still persists.
SO. Not sure what the next steps are. Seems like it is trying to regulate my input, but reacts slowly. Wondering if it has to do with me using external modeling on my guitar and running in distorted input. Not sure why that would make a difference, but I might try just doing the modeling in cakewalk and see if that gives me better results. I'll report back, once i've had a chance to experiment with that.