Comment 40 for bug 883485

To sum up what happened/will happen:

The developer of xfce4-volumed said that xfce4-volumed isn't compatible with pulseaudio, but that's not really accurate. The first problem is a default settings issue (preselection of the correct gst card/channel), and the second culprit is gstreamer pulse plugin is one culprit (basically, the bindings suck, let's say it).

I added a patch in precise to try to preselect a pulseaudio card on Xubuntu (starts by "Playback", contains "PulseAudio"). Obviously that's not optimal, when e.g., the HDMI card is listed before the main card, xfce4-volumed will choose the wrong card (and that's what happens for many people unfortunately).

A few months ago, I "forked" xfce4-volumed and ported it locally to pulseaudio. It works fine here (it takes the default pulse card, you can't change it with xfconf-query anymore, but with pactl or the pulseaudio mixer), but it didn't have many testing and I haven't had time to include it in Xubuntu anyway.
Testing welcome: the sources are at <http://lionel.lefolgoc.net/gitweb/?p=xfce4-volumed-pulse.git;a=summary>, and test packages called "xfce4-volumed-pulse" for precise and quantal are in my ppa <https://launchpad.net/~mrpouit/+archive/ppa> (don't forget to disable xfce4-volumed from autostart or uninstall it).

Xfce4-mixer 4.10 (gstreamer) now has support for keybindings, so I plan to replace xfce4-volumed in raring by its pulseaudio "port". People who don't like pulseaudio can still use xfce4-mixer 4.10, and hopefully other people should have working volume keys out of the box in raring.