Heads up, new audio volume initialization process in natty as of alsa-utils 1.0.24.

[David Henningsson]

On 2011-02-22 06:10, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have just uploaded the last piece of the ALSA update, alsa-utils v1.0.24. The one big change that has been made is the use of the new alsa init database, introduced upstream a few releases ago, but only now being used by Ubuntu. The primary reason we decided to move to the newer init system is because the old init script that we used to use was rather racy in terms of when it was run, and when PulseAudio was started. The big advantage of the new init system is that it allows for machine specific volume configuration, so that if a particular machine needs a particular volume control set at a particular level, or turned on/off, it is possible to configure that volume control for that machine, without worrying about how it will affect other machines.
>
> Volume settings that were set in the init script have been migrated to the new database for natty. For natty+1, the plan is to examine all the volume settings that we carry from the ground up, break them down into individual machine configurations, and submit upstream.
>
> You shouldn't notice any difference for existing installs, as your volume settings are already saved, so things should just go on working. I've tested as much as I can here, without issue. There is a possibility that things have broken for fresh installs on some machines, so if they have, please file a bug in launchpad with "ubuntu-bug alsa-utils".
>
> Thanks to David Henningsson for doing a lot of the packaging updates, and volume init settings migration.

...and thanks to Luke for completing the effort, reviewing and uploading.

In addition, Luke also recently uploaded my rewrite of the PulseAudio 
input mixer, which hopefully would make things as "Microphone 1" and 
"Microphone 2" show up as the more helpful "Front Mic" / "Rear Mic" / 
"Internal Mic" / etc for most people instead - and in some cases even 
provide better quality, as the new version will be better at moving the 
correct hardware sliders. Should you experience problems with this new 
functionality, please file a bug with "ubuntu-bug pulseaudio" and/or 
ping me on IRC (diwic on freenode) about it. Thanks!

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic