[Conky-users] Is it possible to make $mixer work with pulseaudio?

[Sergio C. <sec...@gm...>]

Hello.
I use Debian sid/Xfce with pulseaudio.
I would like to make conky show the master volume level. I can do that
with a bash script but it uses quite more CPU than the default mixer
variable (I have an old system).
The problem is that the built-in $mixer doesn't work properly. It
behaves more or less like this:
0 - 10% vol level = 0% conky
10 - 40% vol level = conky shows double the value
40 - 55% vol level = it gradually goes to 100%
(a little video - not so good - showing the behaviour is at
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B0pn2AoaygzQNmE4Nzk2ZDYtZTBhNS00NWE3LTk3YzAtMWMwODg3OTAxY2Q1
)

Conky is 1.8.1-6 from the repository.

Does anybody know if it's possible to make $mixer work with pulseaudio
(I'm assuming that's the issue here)?
I could try conky from git and even change the source if someone
provides the patch (I'm not a programmer).

Just as a reference, the script I can use to show the volume level is like this:

#!/bin/bash
pactl list sinks | awk '/Volume: 0:/ {print substr($3, 1, index($3, "%") - 1)}'

It just gets the volume level, no mute check.
To check if it's muted ('yes' or 'no') one can use:

#!/bin/bash
pacmd list-sinks 0 | grep muted | cut -d ' ' -f 2

If it's confirmed that it doesn't work with pulseaudio without a patch
then I could open a feature request in sf.net for that.