If by “interface” you are referring to pavucontrol, then it’s perfectly reasonable to make this suggestion but then we do not “market” pavucontrol as anything other than a relatively low level app to expose the functionality of PA to users. We don’t really care about it from a UI design point of view as we expect the Desktop Environment used to provide their own interfaces, integrated tightly into the Desktop Experience itself.

If you meant something else by “interface” then please elaborate so we can discuss properly. But without more details, I cannot really comment.

Just for complete reference and to make sure you’re not being short changed by your distro’s support for KDE+PA, this is what it should look like: http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/KDE

I believe the interface needs a ground up redesign to make it better.

We’ve discussed this now in an upstream bug report but I think this results from a bug in the way PA detects Internal Audio. IMO this could be handled more gracefully, but not sure how best to do it (I’m not really an expert in that bit of the code). The “deciding to mute” scenario is interesting tho’. Not quite sure what the reason for that would be but I suspect it’s something non-obivous. I’d be very interested to get the “pacmd list” output for this muted device – and a screenshot from kmix at the same time.

What did you put in default.pa to make things work? I wouldn’t have thought that any solution to this problem needed a change to default.pa (tho’ admittedly the GUIs to e.g. change the name are not easily found. which I need to address in some capacity)