Comment 0 for bug 961744

Due to the switch to pulseaudio a few releases back, the situation with xfce4-mixer has become more and more troublesome. The multimedia-buttons (especially unmute) don't work well anymore – a problem actually addressed in xfce4-volumed by prioritizing pulseaudio over alsa – et al.
All in all xfce4-mixer was designed for alsa and that's what it works best with. Since Xubuntu uses pulseaudio instead and indicator-sound in the panel it makes far more sense to ship a mixer that can bring forward the advantages of pulseaudio (e.g. per application volume-levels), i.e. pavucontrol.

This is why I propose to replace xfce4-mixer with pavucontrol, it doesn't make sense to ship two mixers, this would only cause a confusing situation (=mix up ;) ) for users.

Obviously this replacement will have consequences, e.g. favoring pavucontrol in the "sound settings" of indicator-sound.