To publish a tour, you need to work with one of VoiceMap’s editors. Mapmaker is built around this, and it has a submission process with email alerts to take you from map to script to audio as quickly as possible, with the benefit of our experience across thousands of tours.
But sometimes you might want to create a tour that you don’t intend to publish – or that you might eventually publish with audio you’ve edited yourself after lots of testing and iteration.
Examples of these situations might be:
- You’d like to “kick the tyres” of Mapmaker, so to speak, before paying for a Pro or Premium plan
- You’re working on a school, university or personal project and you only intend to share it with teachers, classmates or friends
- You have experience working with audio and you’re developing a tour with interviews or complex sound design that requires an iterative production process
In these cases, you can bypass most of the submission process by requesting what we call “private access”. All you need to do is email a description of your project to [email protected]. We grant most of these requests.
What is “private access”? #
Private access makes you the editor of your own tour, with the same permissions as a VoiceMap editor. The only exception to this is that you can’t approve your tour as a whole, which is a necessary step before your tour can be published.
We’ll assume that you don’t want to publish your tour if you request private access, but you can decide to publish the tour at a later stage. You’ll still need to work with a VoiceMap editor to get the map, scripts and audio approved, and this can end up taking longer than just following the recommended submission process in the first place.
How do you use private access? #
With Private access, you’ll add location markers as normal. In most cases, you’ll want to add a route line too.
You can then write scripts for each location, accessed via the Your Script tab. When you do this, you’ll see the Save Location and Submit buttons that you’d see if you only had standard access. The difference is that after you click on Submit, you’ll be able to do the following:
- Approve each script by selecting the Approve button
- Add audio to locations with approved scripts by clicking the Upload Audio tab
How do you distribute tours produced using private access? #
You can choose to submit a tour produced using private access for review by an editor. After they have approved the tour, you can go on to publish it.
If you’d prefer to keep the tour private, it can only be distributed using voucher codes. There is a detailed description of this and other access types here.