Milestone Enterprise and recording audio from Axis P8221

Hello,

We've recently purchased a camera that does not have built in audio, specifically the Axis M3007. In order to get audio for our installation we also purchased the Axis P8221 IO module as well as a mic. Everything comes in to Milestone Enterprise. I have been able to go into the M3007 settings in Milestone and select the P8221 mic as the default mic. When I open the smart client I can hear the audio when viewing live. However, when I record the camera upon playback there is no audio.

Note that when I add the P8221 as a hardware device in Milestone that by default it adds a camera, mic and speaker. I have disabled the speaker since none is attached. I can't disable the camera because when I do it also disables the mic. If I check the mic settings I can select Record- Always, Never, or Follow video. I have selected Follow Video.

I can't figure out why this isn't recording the audio. Is it because the "Follow Video" option is actually referring to the camera that it detects as being attached to the P8221?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I'm using Essential but it's probably the same.

In "Camera Properties" there's an entry "Audio" on the left. Select that and the right hand side of the dialog box should say "Audio selection" and give you the option to select the "Default microphone".

Set it to your 8221.

You can also manually select the audio device in the Smart Client.

Does this help?

Thanks for the reply.

You're correct, it's the same in Enterprise. I already configured the settings you mentioned in your post, but had no luck. If I launch the smart client and select the camera I can hear the audio just fine during the live view, but when I trigger a recording there is no audio included in the playback.

Just to review here is what I did in the Management Application:

Expanded Advanced Settings

Expanded Cameras and Storage Information

Right-clicked the camera in question, chose properties

Select the Audio section under the camera Properties

Selected the P8221 as the default mic

Next, I selected the actions for the mic

Expanded Advanced Settings

Expanded Microphones

Selected the mic set as the default in the camera properties above

Right-clicked the mic and selected properties

Checked the enabled box

Under the recording settings, chose the option Follow Video

I will mention I haven't tried setting the recording settings option to always yet-I will try that tomorrow when I get a chance.

Any other suggestions?

I will mention I haven't tried setting the recording settings option to always yet-I will try that tomorrow when I get a chance.

I have mine set to record always. Follow video will likely just record when the 8221 records video - which would be never. I've never used that setting...

Another annoying thing is that you can't export audio from an area that has no active video.

As a follow up to my last post I decided to remote in to the server to set the mic settings to "Always" for recording settings. After triggering a recording I can confirm that I did have audio on playback. Switching it back to follow video leads to no audio being recorded.

So my question would be, if I set it to always record, is it just sitting there recording audio 24/7 to the server and eating up storage space? I guess there's not much else I can do other than to purchase a different camera that either has a mic input or a mic built in?

I'm happy to report that I think I have this working correctly now. What I failed to realize was that I had created an event to start and stop the recording on the camera, but I never added that same event on the P8221. A friend of mine pointed it out to me so I tried it and it worked as expected....thanks Pat!

Thanks for the assistance. I appreciate the feedback.