Created attachment 3927 Script to toggle PulseAudio muting While using the XF86AudioMute media key to toggle mute, PulseAudio gets muted but never gets unmuted. Alsa does get toggled correctly, as verified with alsamixer & the xfce mixer panel shows that the master channel gets un/muted properly. With PulseAudio being muted the only way to fix it is with the mute/unmute button in the sound notification icon or by calling 'pactl set-sink-mute # 1' where # is the audio card that muted. This happens on Xubuntu 11.10, tested on 2 laptops. As a workaround, I've modified a simple script that can be bound to the media key in the system settings window to toggle the mute function in PulseAudio for all the cards present.
On further inspection this is a bug in PulseAudio, not xfce-mixer.