Comment 24 for bug 322909

In Karmic Beta the only reasonable way to control audio without pulseaudio - is with text-based alsamixer.

It is a disaster!
There is no sound applet with mixer
alsamixergui is outdated
gamix has a buggy gui geometry issues and meter drawing inconsistencies
gnome-alsamixer does not recognize some switches correctly
sound hotkeys do not work

Without pulseaudio sound control is broken.