Thinkpad audio mute not being represented

[Milosz Tanski]

The thinkpads with multimedia keys have two sound mixers, they have one that's part of the sour card (in my case the intel hda), and a second one that is exposed via the thinkpad acpi api. The thinpad mixer is exposed via: /proc/acpi/ibm/volume and the keys on the thinkpad are wired in hardware to control that mixer, now ubuntu also captures those keys and that's where the problem occurs....

Let me explain what happens, when you press the mute key on the z61t the internal thinkpad mixer is muted, cat /proc/acpi/ibm/volume shows:
...
mute: on
...

and ubuntu also mutes the hda's mixer. Now the problem happens when you unset the mute in any gnome/alsa application, the hda mixer is unmuted, but the thinkpad one isn't. Now the confusion comes in when your gnome-volume-applet (and every other app) shows you that the card should be as loud as possible but nothing plays, because the thinkpad mute is never unset.

It took me about 3 months of strugle and ressting my bios to get sound output working before I figured out that this /proc/acpi/ibm/volume magic exists... Since you guys work so hard on getting laptops working right, can you please integrate this in so other people don't strugle like me.

This occurs with my z61t, but I'm sure it happens with other ones as well.