I just installed Pulse Audio over my ALSA installation. Is there a Pulse Audio mixer, something like alsamixer
, that I can use for tasks such as changing the microphone gain?

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4 Answers
Remember that Alsa is not removed when installing Pulseaudio. Pulseaudio uses Alsa in quite some extent and you could say it's a layer on top of Alsa.
There's pavucontrol
(on Debian/Ubuntu also the package name). It allows you to do a little bit more configuration on the Pulseaudio server and Pulseaudio-managed things like Bluetooth audio profile selection. Some regular volume actions are just passed to the Alsa layer and are the same as adjusting them using alsamixer
or alike.

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If you, too, don't like to use the mouse: On Ubuntu 18.10 I found pamix
as an ncurses-based alternative to pavucontrol. Use F1-F5 to switch tabs, vi-like (or arrow key) movement, see man page.

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While pavucontrol
is the goto, and probably the best one out there, it's important to mention that all X11 mixers are likely Pulse Mixer as it's by far the most popular sound daemon.
For example on XFCE, you can change the Microphone gain with the little notifier application,

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alsamixer
didn't help me, because I couldn't adjust the 5.1 channels separately. you needpavucontrol
for that, as gertvdijk pointed out in this answer. – Sentry Dec 14 '12 at 14:52