I have recently installed Narwhal.

Everything seems to look good so far, but as usual sound via PulseAudio is deeply unsatisfactory; scratchy sound from Skype, choppy sound from command line apps, etc. So I've removed it, and sound now works fine.

Unfortunately I now discover that the standard Gnome mixer applet has changed to being PulseAudio-only, and trying to run it just hangs waiting for a PulseAudio connection.

Does anyone know of a replacement volume control applet that I could use which manipulates the ALSA mixer directly?

I've found xfce4-volumed, which handles the hotkeys very nicely (once I disable the keyboard shortcuts in Gnome), but of course the XFCE4 mixer applet isn't compatible with Gnome so I can't use that; and there appears to be nothing else readily apparent...