Mixer resets

[Rem P Roberti]

I use a ham radio program (fldigi) that needs to have the sound card
tweaked from time to time.  I started out just doing it from the command
line via mixer.  After a while I installed gmixer because having a
graphical interface made things go a lot quicker.  But I discovered that
every time I invoked gmixer it reset the vol to 0:0.  It continues to do
that, and I'm wondering if anyone else has that experience with gmixer.
Could that be a bug?  Are there other graphical mixer alternatives?

--Rem