I have Debian Wheezy, with Alsa and an SB Live soundcard. Everything worked exactly as I wanted. That is untill I installed Pulseaudio, (because Skype insisted).

Installing pulse has given me 2 problems.
The first:
My Headphones don't work anymore. In Alsamixer, I did F6 to get the soundcard, and then moved every slider, but nothing helped. Tried different sockets. Tried the Headphones in the Speaker socket, that worked, but then the Speakers don't work.

The second:
Every time I try to move a software Volume control (eg In the Lxpanel, in Xine, or in Audacious), the channels for PCM, FRONT, SURROUND, and LFE, all jump to maximum and seriously distort the sound. The only way I can get around this, is to use amixer in a script to keep these channels to a suitable level.

I really need those headphones to work, and I would prefer if the Lxpanel vol control worked as well. Any ideas?

pulseaudio probably installed its own mixer app. from now on you should use that instead of alsamixer.

have you tried to research your problem? it's rather common.

if you need more help, please post some relevant output.

Indeed. I believe it's the Pulse Audio Volume Control that could resolve this. If you need to apt-get install it it's called pavucontrol.
Sadly I have had lots of experience fighting the horrific pile of stinking rubbish that is Pulse Audio (I usually try not to say bad things about free projects but the way Pulse Audio has been thrust upon people and the fact is is a CPU hogging, buggy, conflict-prone, difficult to configure pile of rubbish means I can't help but voice my opinion).

Thank you for your replies.
If Pulseaudio has a mixer, what is it called?
I have researched the problem, and found the problem is very common, what is not so common is the solution.

Can I remove pavucontrol, without breaking pulseaudio? I still need pulse to enable Skype.

Pulseaudio comes with its own control center (pavucontrol) where you can set volumes and route applications to different audio outputs.

@273: I never had any problems with Pulseaudio. If it doesn't work at all for you, have you files bug reports so that this can be fixed? Also, have you tried if those problems also occur with other distros?

i think now you're confusing things.
pavucontrol is pulseaudio's mixer app.
don't remove it. don't remove anything alsa-related, either, because pulseaudio is built on top of alsa.

fwiw, there's various mixer apps that support pulseaudio, but you should try to solve your problem first.
it might be slightly more complex than changing mixer apps.