Comment 40 for bug 322909

Is this still being investigated? Since I've upgraded to Lucid, I can confirm weird behaviour when adjusting volume levels either by the new volume applet in Gnome (indicator) or by media keys. This is very annoying since it renders volume control rather useless. Concerning the system running here (Intel HDA), this must have been introduced with Lucid, as with Karmic everything went as expected (i.e., somewhat 'linear' control).

The current behaviour here is as follows:

When using the media keys on my keyboard with the volume initially set to 0, this effects the 'Front' channel in the first place. Pressing the appropriate media key three times sets the Front volume to 100% in three steps; this is when the volume has reached its maximum value. The same applies to the volume slider in the Gnome panel (indicator) - it sets Front to 100% after about 10% of the slider width. After that, and when Front has reached 100%, further volume increase effects the 'Master Front' channel rather granular; yet there is no more increase in actual volume.

Manually setting 'volume = ignore' values in /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common is not really an option as this file will most likely be overwritten when receiving updates for pulseaudio; also, messing around in system files is not what I'd call a 'clean' solution..