Problem with Sound settings

[Jape Person]

On 01/23/2015 11:30 AM, Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Jan 2015 11:13:37 -0500
> Jape Person <japers at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> Your description describes precisely my experience with Xfce in the
>> Debian testing environment on four very different systems. All were
>> installed from different installation images (though all were netinst).
>> One is an upgrade all the way from Lenny, the most recent install was
>> from RC2 of the Jessie installer done last week. The other two systems
>> fall in between insofar as original .iso image.
>>
>> Three of the systems are notebooks with volume and mute-unmute keys and
>> behave exactly as you say wrt those keys. Mute kills everything, unmute
>> only unmutes the master setting. And unmuting from the panel applet only
>> unmutes master, also. I have to open the mixer control to unmute
>> headphone, speaker, PCM, whatever.
>
> This is due to an incompatibility between the sound system, and the driver reading the keys.
>
> IIRC one of the sound systems (asla ?) has a muting command the toggles mute/umute while the other (Pulseaudio ?) has one mute command, and one umute.
>
> So if the key driver is set for one sound system, and you use the other, you are buggered.
>
> And the same applies to the default panel volume control app.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ron.
>
OIC.

Thank you for the information.

Time for a little experimentation.