My phone is permanently on vibrate (have young kids in the house and don't want to wake them), so changing the ringer is frustrating at most.
1) Press volume button to bring up volume controls
2) Tap the arrow on the right to expand
3) Adjust ring/music/alarm volumes as needed: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/05/android_...
Android's system of adjusting media volume when media is playing and ringer volume when it isn't seems like a reasonably clean solution. It takes a single tap to expand to the three sliders.
Maybe a shortcut where where pressing volume up/down simultaneously mutes everything?
So you reduce the volume, but it only reduced the ringer for calls, which isn't what you want.
As the sibling answer says, newer Androids can do this. One click to display the volume, a touch to see the individual controls and then slide.
This is exactly what I want.
Honestly, the most intuitive option for me would the audio controls should never touch the ringer, bury that behind a menu, rather than switching based on context.
You can always adjust the ringer (something people rarely do -- for quite times there's the "silent" mode anyway) from the UI, and always use the volume buttons for the system's (music, video etc) audio volume.
You can touch the screen to drop the selector, click on which volume you want, and go ahead with using the rocker for that volume selector.
To silence app-audio, I use just: volume-rocker, click on down arrow, click on music icon to mute. That's it.