That sounds interesting... Lemme think about that.

OK, so I tend to like this. There's the problem of having the icon give an
approximation of the volume, which would no longer be possible, unless we
re-start using our own icons, which kind of sucks. In HEAD, there's a tooltip
which shows the track being controller (e.g. "Microphone: 70%" if the volume is
70%). Is that a good enough alternative?

I would like the icons, really, but I'm not sure about requiring various icon
sets or losing the volume indication in the icon set...

While I like the icons that indicate volume, I think the tooltip is adequate 
(it's no worse than Windows, IIRC).  I think I mostly pay attention to the icon
only if I'm changing the volume anyway.

I don't know much about the internals, but (just dreaming here) could the icon
box be split in two?  Show the device in the left half and volume bars on the
right.  Then handling the volume display would be the same for all devices
(right down to the icons).  You could overlay an X on the volume side for mute
and that would be device-independent too.

Yes, that could be done. It's not like it's the first thing in the world that is
release-critical and needs fixing right now!, but it's cool for "at some point",
so let's keep it open for that.

I'd call this a usability issue, personally. I've got a couple volume controls
on my panel for different devices, and every time i need to manipulate one, I
have to go over in my head "okay, in what order did I add those applets?".
Worse, if i've ever accidentally moved one to rearrange them, it's impossible to
tell that i've done so.

Ubuntu bug about that: https://launchpad.net/products/gnome-applets/+bug/43229

"Gnome-panel allows to add multiple mixer applets.

This is pretty nice feature (although it could work better - but this is not a purpose of this bug report) and with this feature I can put for example two applets on my panel.

One for my speakers and another for microphone - for example when I don't use microphone I want to have an ability to mute microphone in one click - but while I use for VOIP then I unmute in single click.

This is cool - but I think that it could be nice to add an ability to set different icons with speaker if selected channel is related with speakers and microphone icon when selected device is microphone (or other input).

Of course this is pretty hard to implement but I think that it's easy to set two types of icons - one for input and another for output.

Then maybe in applet preferences user could select other icons if needed (with speaker, headset, microphone, line input... etc)

I think that this applet GUI should be redesigned but this feature could be nice on beginning."

What about just putting up a static icon, and adding just the ))) bars to the side arbitrarilly, in the standard gtk foreground color? It would be fairly hard to misinterpret.

That said, with the large and unpredictable set of mixers that may be available from alsa, it's probabbly an unfortunate neccessity that the user has the option of specifying the icon manually, via dialog or gconf, as a last-resort. (Short of adding text labels to the panel, which I don't personally care for, especially because the text labels from ALSA can be confusing, when they're not vauge or re-used for multiple mixers with the same description. :) )

*** Bug 334708 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This would really be a good addition for me too, personally I would rather have an icon that shows me what kind of device it is (I use the internal sound card and a USB headset) and only shows if it's muted or not, than an icon that display no information whatsoever on the type of the device, but shows me the volume.