Xfce4-mixer pulseaudio support

[Brandon Watkins]

Let me begin with saying that through the developers' hard work, XFCE has
grown into a very complete desktop, especially considering how lightweight
and fast it is. I've recently switched from gnome, and XFCE is a great
change of scenery. Certainly a desktop that deserves more popularity and
manpower :)

The one weak point I found on the XFCE desktop was the volume mixer. On a
system using pulseaudio it just doesn't work well at all, and there really
aren't any good alternative applets (The only one I found that had good
pulseaudio support was pnmixer, but its buggy and doesn't seem to be under
active development anymore).

I've managed to workaround most of the mixer's pulseaudio shortcomings
(setting both the mixer and the applet to use the default pulseaudio output
makes it show the correct volume in the panel most of the time), set
pavucontrol to launch on left click, and for volume hotkeys I was able to
use the cli program "pulsemix" as an alternative to xfce4-volumed (which
didn't work well with pulse at all) and map its pause/mute toggle/prev/next
commands to xfce's keyboard settings.

However even though these workarounds can overcome most of the
shortcomings, there are still some issues. For example, If I am using the
HDMI output on my laptop, the panel applet stops reflecting the correct
volume, until I go in and change sound card again in the applet and mixer
settings.

Is this something that is planned for a future version? I think having a
mixer that supports pulseaudio would make things so much easier for users
that want to use XFCE and pulseaudio, but not use the gnome volume applet
which pulls in tons of gnome dependencies.
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