Ubuntu – No sound settings available in the settings manager window

I got a clue somewhere to look in Settings / Settings Editor (not the normal Settings Manager)

Then, under xfce4-mixer, there was the setting /active-card which had the value:

PlaybackHighDefinitionAudioControllerDigitalStereoHDMIPulseAudioMixer

I selected 'active-card', and hit the 'Reset Property' button. That turned the setting into:

PlaybackBuiltinAudioAnalogStereoPulseAudioMixer

( These names closely follow the names of the Output Devices in pavucontrol see screenshot )

After a reboot, it worked. My volume buttons now affect the volume in the speakers.

(Scrub my earlier, now deleted, hint/comment about Play/Pause not working. They (still) work fine in Rhythmbox - that was/is an unrelated problem with gmusicbrowser)

This may or may not work for you! :-)

EDIT: For some reason, my xfce profile got corrupted and I've restarted from scratch by rm -rf ~/.config. Now, only a few days later, resetting it didn't work for me either, but setting /active-card to PlaybackBuiltinAudioAnalogStereoPulseAudioMixer did.

EDIT: If the above did not work try setting this via terminal and xfconf, e.g.

    xfconf-query -c xfce4-mixer -p /active-card -s 'PlaybackBuiltinAudioAnalogStereoPulseAudioMixer'

It looks like you're not using the default Xfce volume slider (perhaps in Xubuntu it is default, but not in Xfce). I suspect that you're using the indicator plugin, which I don't like nor use. I would suggest that you try adding Audio Mixer plugin to the panel.

To have it available you need to:

sudo apt-get install xfce4-mixer