Comment 55 for bug 400820

Vincenzo, see my comment above with the link to the other bug report. While it was great that this symptom was solved, it doesn't fix the root of the problem (too much hard-coded dependence on Pulse).

In GNOME 2.26, the applet is called gnome-sound-properties (this is what System->Preferences->Sound points to). You get a nice GUI to configure gstreamer, media keys, and event sounds regardless of whether or not you have Pulse (this was also working in Karmic/GNOME 2.27 until recently).

One can use the gstreamer-properties command and build gnome-media from source (using the --enable-gstmix flag) to get a rough equivalent to that GUI, but n00bs aren't going to grok this (especially the ones that removed Pulse to fix their audio issues). The sensible thing would be to use the fancy Pulse volume features if Pulse is detected and fall back on the proven gstmixer if not.

A little off-topic: The same "use Pulse if there, fallback to gstreamer if not" should also apply to libcanberra, which is another needlessly broken package for those not using ALSA/Pulse. (When I built it with the gstreamer backend, my system sounds worked fine, even with OSS4.) I filed a bug with Debian for that one, but I'm thinking of filing one here as well if it continues to get no response.