After updating my slackware-current and getting pulse all set up everything seems to be working well. The only problem I have is that my headset (which is also my default soundcard) is always muted after a reboot.

I have 3 sound devices. Speakers on a soundblaster card, headset on the built in audio controller, and HDMI on my graphics card (which I don't use). Every time I start up the PC my built in audio is muted and the HDMI is un-muted. I keep muting the HDMI and un-muting the built-in audio but pulse always forgets the settings.

Is there something I need to run to tell pulse to remember the mixer settings? Something like "alsactl store" but for pulse.

I kind of answered my own question there I just ran "alsactl store" again as root after setting things up in pavucontrol and after a reboot my headset wasn't muted anymore. It doesn't save all the settings though because my microphone was lower than it should be and the HDMI was also un-muted. It doesn't feel like the real solution, but it at least means I don't have to keep loading up the mixer every time to get my headset to work.

Now I really found the problem, and it was me . After pulseaudio got installed I thought I had to start rc.pulseaudio at boot to make it work, but you don't have to. I removed "rc.pulseaudio start" from my rc.local and also made rc.alsa non-executable and now when pulseaudio is needed the daemon is autospawned and the mixer settings from pavucontrol are restored from my users settings.

Starting pulseaudio at system start meant it wasn't reading my user mixer settings, and alsactl doesn't seem to be able to restore all the settings.

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I'm curious as to why rc.alsa is still an executable after the update with installing PulseAudio? How are the mixer settings being saved/restored if rc.alsa is not executing at boot in your case?

Apparently rc.alsa is not meant to be executable by default anymore, but it was on my system because that's how it was when I first installed slackware 14 on here.

The mixer settings are saved and restored by pulseaudio itself. I think they are stored in ~/.config/pulse.

Without rc.alsa getting run at boot the mixer settings will be uninitialised until I run a program that uses pulse and autospawns the daemon, then pulse will initialise the volumes.

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alsactl store still works Pulse just uses alsa. the pavucontrol settings are saved .config/pavucontrol.ini
please keep this simple. if you have issues with html5 play back remember html5 only looks for hw,0 so up to you to make sure that you set that
in your /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf
if your sound becomes distorted you may have that device play back up to high in your pavucontrol.
If you want full control of all devices sinked with jack2 and qjackctl sinking with pulseaudio hang on I am working on the tutorial and the scripts to use with the
custom .asoundrc. This is not new but is for our part of the distro.

alsactl store still works Pulse just uses alsa. the pavucontrol settings are saved .config/pavucontrol.ini
please keep this simple. if you have issues with html5 play back remember html5 only looks for hw,0 so up to you to make sure that you set that
in your /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf
if your sound becomes distorted you may have that device play back up to high in your pavucontrol.
If you want full control of all devices sinked with jack2 and qjackctl sinking with pulseaudio hang on I am working on the tutorial and the scripts to use with the
custom .asoundrc. This is not new but is for our part of the distro.

Mine is currently executable as well. I'll have to install a fresh 64-current in a virtual machine and compare all of the alsa/pulseaudio files and their attributes with what my main install has. It was a fresh install of 64-current back in November 2015.

from today's ChangeLog:
As I understand it, rc.alsa runs alsactl to restore mixer settings. Not quite sure yet if this is true when pulseaudio gets spawned - and I will be the first to admit I've avoided pulseaudio like the plague - but may mean some tweaking might be in order as we move through beta and test various sound hardware.

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Yes, I just confirmed that with a new 64-current install in a VM.

Yes, if rc.alsa is executable it restores the mixer settings at boot. The problem is alsactl doesn't seem to be able to restore all the mixer settings when pulseaudio is used. It restored output volumes OK but not microphone volume or the muted state of some devices for me.

For me pulse works better if I just leave rc.pulseaudio and rc.alsa non-executable and let pulseaudio daemon autospawn when needed so that it loads my mixer settings from ~/.pulse/config and then everything is how I left it at system shutdown. This way you also have per-user mixer settings.

It might be possible to copy the mixer settings from ~/.config/pulse to somewhere else so that if you needed pulse run as system it will load them.