Tutorials Archives | VoiceMap's Blog

Upcoming Webinar | How to Tell a Story with Tom Darbyshire

Join us on 18 March 2026 for a webinar on how to create more engaging tours, hosted by one of VoiceMap’s most accomplished publishers.

Tom Darbyshire spent decades as an advertising creative director, helping many of the world’s most famous brands tell their stories, in everything from radio spots to Super Bowl commercials. He learned tricks that make even dull things interesting – with limited word counts – and taught those skills to generations of young writers. He was even nominated for a Prime Time Emmy.

His TellBetter tours of New York City are so engaging he routinely has the highest sales of any single publisher on VoiceMap. Listen to this example of the craftsmanship he brings to every story from his tour The Lower East Side: Tenement tales of hardship, hope and humor.

During the webinar, he’ll use the example – along with a few other publishers’ standout locations – to illustrate practical tips anyone can use to craft better scripts.

Why We Built a Recorder into the VoiceMap App

We recently released an integrated recorder directly into the VoiceMap app. It has an autocue that displays the script for each location automatically, scrolling at the speed you select. It also has professional-quality recording settings, immediate playback for quality checking, and a feature for instantly uploading audio to tour locations.

Self-guided tours are technically complex, especially when they have both audio and automatic GPS playback. Mapmaker, our publishing tool, is built to remove the trial and error that new producers typically experience at various steps in the process – from mapping to scripting and recording, and even through to distribution. This is why VoiceMap is the best, most comprehensive solution for creating self-guided audio tours, and our in-app audio recorder is no different. We didn’t just build it to add another feature. We solved a real problem for our publishers.

Indoor Tours Webinar: Highlights and Insights

VoiceMap has focused almost exclusively on outdoor tours so far. We describe our reasons in more detail below, but they boil down to the fact that GPS playback creates an opportunity to deliver a compelling user experience whether a tour is in Stockholm, San Francisco or Shanghai. But our focus is starting to shift because we see strong demand for indoor tours at museums and art galleries, where GPS doesn’t work.

We hosted a webinar on 23 April 2025 for publishers to explain our understanding of this opportunity and demonstrate how our user interface for indoor tours works. We also gave an overview of how to set up your own indoor tour in Mapmaker.

You’ll find a summary below, along with a new program offering 100% royalties for new indoor tours. There’s also a video recording of the entire webinar.

Webinar Recording: Introducing Our New, Improved Pricing Plans

VoiceMap held a webinar in April to introduce publishers to the two new pricing plans we’ve launched as well as the extra features and services that are now included in the Pro and Premium plans.

If you missed it, here’s a recording of the hour-long discussion. We talk about the “old plans” and how and why we’ve improved them. Key to this are quicker turnaround times for tour production, along with additional production services, and more structured support with tour distribution and everything else that goes into getting VoiceMap tours noticed and promoted.

You may want to jump to a specific topic, which you can do by viewing the highlights below. At the end, we answer some questions which you may have been thinking about yourself.

Some highlights from the webinar:

(3:35) The introduction of the two new plans

(5:03) How will the new plans help with producing audio tours?

(6:36) A look at what’s new in MapMaker, to help you know when your estimated review date will be

Sound design resources for audio tours

It’s not just a great story that makes a tour. Tasteful sound design and the right choice of music can go a long way to helping bring your tour to life and further immerse your listener in the journey you’re taking them on.

But knowing where to find the right royalty-free sound or track is not easy if you don’t know where to look. So we’ve put together a list of resources where you can find great sounding, useable and best of all, free material.

Once you have the sounds or music you want, you can email them over to your editor. Our audio editors will edit and mix in the sounds for you.

Continue reading Sound design resources for audio tours

Armchair audio tours

It can feel a little bit like magic when VoiceMap tours point out a revealing detail at exactly the right moment, to show you something you’d normally walk by without a sideways glance. But it’s actually a spell that has been carefully produced by our editors, who help every single one of our publishers with the ins and outs of automatic GPS playback.

That’s why we’re surprised by our data, which suggests that for a surprising number of VoiceMap’s listeners, automatic playback doesn’t matter at all. In fact, over the last 12 months, about 15% of them have started tours more than 100 kilometres from their starting points. And about a quarter have used the VoiceMap app’s Continuous Play feature, which is designed for listeners who might be at home washing the dishes, or on their way to work – or on an aeroplane at the start of a trip.

Continue reading Armchair audio tours

How to Record Your Voice Using Apps for iOS and Android

Not everyone is an audiophile, into the latest and greatest amplifiers and Hi-Fi’s, or a Sound Engineer with the know-how of the properties of noise, or even a techie nerd into all things gadgety. And that’s OK. I am all of the above and I’m here to (try and) help you!

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re wanting to record some audio on your phone, and get decent results. But, you’re not sure where to begin…

Well, most phones have some sort of recording app already, but it’s probably quite limited in functionality, and quality – and for the purposes of your recording, we want the best audio that is possible! No point in making a recording that has incomprehensible, unusable sound, right? Right!

Storytelling in Games vs. Location-Aware Fiction

Kate Gorman is a storyteller with a background in theatre, film, and writing novels. She’s passionate about sci-fi, virtual realities and, naturally, Star Trek. To her, getting her own holodeck – a virtual reality facility from the Star Trek Universe, often used for participating in interactive stories or recreating familiar environments – would be a dream come true. But sadly, we don’t live in the future yet and creating such a device would cost a lot of money, so instead she used what is available to her : location-aware, GPS storytelling. Making use of a real-world environment, she produced a four-episode audio walk series in Washington D.C. using VoiceMap’s storytelling platform, creating a sensory experience that is similar to what someone in a virtual, interactive reality might have.

Continue reading Storytelling in Games vs. Location-Aware Fiction

Recording Great Audio on iOS Devices

Creating a walking tour with VoiceMap is easy and lots of fun, but there are also a few new things to be learned. Recording the best possible quality audio for your walk will mean more people enjoying and sharing your route. Remember, during a walk, your voice is all they have! This tutorial will help you to create the best possible audio using your iOS device.

Installing a Voice Recorder

1. Go to the iTunes store and download Recordium (free).

Continue reading Recording Great Audio on iOS Devices

How to Effectively Link to Your Audio Tour Online

There are a few things you can do to maximise the effectiveness of a link to your audio tour so that it helps bring in search traffic from Google. Think of this post as a very brief beginners guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Keywords are key

The text that you use to link to your audio tour in an article, blog post, or press release influences how easily people find your tour in a Google search. Using a plain URL (www.voicemap.me, for instance) or the word “here” does very little to help people find your tour using Google. Instead, try and identify the most effective link text.

Continue reading How to Effectively Link to Your Audio Tour Online

Creative and Time-Efficient Ways to Promote your Audio Tour

In Cape Town, the locations along several of our city centre routes are intriguingly marked with geotag-shaped stickers, and it really gets people talking. The stickers invite passers-by to “listen to stories from the District Six Museum” – or The Book Lounge, or Mogalakwena Gallery – and list a couple of the audio walks that feature this particular location, with instructions for downloading them.

The businesses and organisations we approach are generally thrilled to hear that they are already included (at no cost) in the commentary of a walk that passes right by their door. In those cases, placing a custom-made sticker in their window is a win-win situation – assuming that the commentary is flattering, of course.

Location-aware audio connects a voice to a place. The real trick is finding ways to inform people that the voice – and the story – exists. Stickers, posters and signage are among the most effective ways of doing that.

Continue reading Creative and Time-Efficient Ways to Promote your Audio Tour

4 Questions that your Press Release Should Answer

Audio tour apps are exciting and new, so getting websites and other publications to run a press release or article about yours shouldn’t be difficult. Press releases are a great way of communicating to specific audiences, and editors are often happy to have the work taken out of writing something themselves.

We’ve done our best to take some of the work out of the process for you, too. Read on to find plenty of examples from press releases – which you can reword to reflect your own personality – along with the four essential questions that a press release promoting your audio tour should answer.

Continue reading 4 Questions that your Press Release Should Answer

Recording Great Audio on Android Devices

Creating a VoiceMap audio tour is easy, intuitive and a great way to tell your stories, but there are also a few new things to be learned. Recording the best possible quality audio for your tour will mean more people enjoying and sharing it. It’s your voice that will be giving directions and telling stories, so this tutorial will help you to create the best possible audio using your Android device.

Installing a Voice Recorder

1. Go to the Google Play store and download Smart Voice Recorder (free).

Continue reading Recording Great Audio on Android Devices

Looking past the obvious in LA: Aric Allen on Hollywood

“Location-aware audio walk” doesn’t trip off the tongue, does it? It’s a phrase for a technical medium, with lots of moving parts, and sometimes VoiceMap’s storytellers get bogged down by all of our publishing tool’s many mechanics.

The result is a list of facts instead of stories, with the things that are physically most obvious at the forefront – the monuments, buildings, and landmarks that get mapped out right at the beginning of the process – instead of the stories that made the walk compelling in the first place.

Continue reading Looking past the obvious in LA: Aric Allen on Hollywood

Using a GPS Logger

When you start your VoiceMap, the first step is plotting your route. If your route goes through a city, it’s easy to do using our online tool. Landmarks and streets are easily visible, and you can flip between the map, satellite photographs and street view. But for routes on outdoor paths, it can be hard to see where to put the line. Isolating small landmarks that aren’t visible on maps is tricky too, and it’s best to use a GPS logger application.

Continue reading Using a GPS Logger