When I use the mixer applet while another volume control (gnome-volume-control or the pulseaudio volume control) is running, muting happens randomly while I drag the slider.
Problem is that there's no get_mute, so the only way to get the status reliably is to use the new notification mechanism to get updates. This is a pretty large change to add to gnome-media right now. There's also problems with the tracks' left and right channels randomly unlocking themselves from each other, which are probably due to some get_volume failing within the alsa mixer plugin. Which version of the mixer applet are you using? It shouldn't mute the track when volume is reaching 0 anymore.
This is with gnome-media-2.20.0-2.fc8 And, urgh, now that I try again, I see random muting even without any other volume control app running...
gnome-applets-2.20.0-5.fc8
So that's the mixer applet running on its own causing problems? The mute overlay is used for volume == 0, and when muted (properly), so this means that gstreamer/alsa is sending spurious mute updated messages, or that the volume getting gets 0. Could you please ltrace the mixer applet and check the results for failed snd_mixer_selem_get_playback_volume()? I haven't been able to reproduce the problem. If the problem comes from spurious mute messages, I'll cook up a patch to gnome-applets for debugging.
I cannot really reproduce the problem anymore here. So lets assume that things work better now.
Hi there, please try also with gnome-media 2.23.3 (should be out in a few hours ;), it removes the weird code that was muting the device when all sliders where 0, and was not changing this back according to device events.