I have tried searching to no avail, when I use my laptop volume keys to mute, Kmix mutes MASTER, PCM and HEADPHONES. Yet when unmuting it only affects MASTER leaving me to manually go into mixer and unmute other 2, or making global shortcuts to unmute each separately (CTRL+mute for PCM, ALT+mute for HEADPHONES) this works but is annoying, also muting only PCM or HPHONES mutes all 3.

I have stumbled upon alsamixer (terminal) which when muting, mutes all 3. Than when unmuting, unmutes all 3 as well.

I am a newbie to linux and kde, is there a way to have Kmix use the alsamixer muting/unmuting method when using volume keys? I hope I am explaining correctly.

Any ideas would be most welcome. Thanks!

Could you please also specify which exact version of KDE you are using as well as the distribution?

kded4 --version
RETURNS:
Qt: 4.8.2
KDE Development Platform: 4.8.4 (4.8.4)
KDE Daemon: $Id$

Kali 1.0.8 64 bit

HDA Intel (92HD71B7X Analog)

Right, that is rather outdated, though, current KDE release is 4.13.3, 4.8.x was several years ago, I strongly suggest you upgrade your system.

Funny, never heard of a distribution called Kali, but from their boosting website ("most advanced") I would assume they can provide some more recent KDE packages...

I installed veromix and set global shortcuts to it and it worked until a reboot, ill try and do some research on how to upgrade kde, this version I have is the most current that their repos offer. I Will have to try and figure out how to upgrade or if its possible with their current software. I run Kubuntu 14.04 on my multimedia desktop and it works perfect, but it also has HDMI out for audio/video. trying to get the hang of nix and how dependencies, repos, ppa's, and all that magic works. Thanks for the help!

I had the same issue on gentoo after upgrade to 4.14.3. After logging out and issuing rm -rf ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmix/ ~/.kde4/share/config/kmix* the mute/unmute works again fine, without any keyboard shortcuts hacks. So it seems it was an upgrade issue.