Volume control on panel no longer has effect

[Nigel Henry]

On Friday 03 April 2009 13:16, Dave M G wrote:
> Ubuntu Users,
>
> It used to be that if I clicked on the small speaker icon on my Gnome
> panel, it would reveal a vertical slider that would control my
> computer's volume.
>
> However, recently this has stopped working. I get the slider, but moving
> it changes nothing.
>
> If I double click on the speaker icon, I get a window for "Volume
> Control" with a bunch of dual-sliders for various audio devices.
>
> If I move the "Master" sliders up and down, nothing happens.
>
> If I move the "PCM" sliders, that controls the audio.
>
> I'm assuming, then, that the slider that appears under the speaker icon
> is tied to the "Master" channel.
>
> Should it be tied to "PCM"?
>
> Is "Master" deprecated?
>
> How do I get the quick access to overall volume control that I used to
> have?
>
> Thanks for any help or advice.
>
> --
> Dave M G

Hi Dave.

I havn't got anything booted up at the moment that's running Gnome, but in 
KDE, if you right click on the volume control, you can set it to control 
whichever alsamixer slider you want.

Perhaps it works the same with Gnome's volume control.

Opening alsamixer in a terminal will just show you the pulseaudio control, but 
if you open alsamixer as below (assuming you only have one soundcard), you 
will see all controls for the soundcard. Perhaps the master slider has become 
muted for some reason or other. The M key toggles the mute/unmute.

alsamixer -D hw:0

Nigel.