Audioguide: a multi-museum audio-guide platform, built and run by us since 2020

Audioguide offers audio guides to museum visitors. It needed a platform that many museums could share, that visitors could use on their own phones without installing anything, and that would stay available while visitors were in the museum.

• A multi-museum platform on one codebase, giving each museum its own site.
• Visitors use their own phone in the browser. They activate the guide with a ticket or card code, which the platform issues, validates and expires, then listen to the museum's tracks in several languages.
• Audio can be downloaded for offline listening where coverage is poor.
• A back office and daily reports for the client.
• High availability from the beginning: two production servers behind a load balancer, a synchronised database cluster and shared storage, and a media server for the audio.

We designed and built the platform in 2020, and we have developed and operated it ever since, adding museums and features over the years.

In 2026 we modernised the infrastructure without stopping the museums. We moved the platform onto two new servers on current, supported software, with visitor sessions held centrally, monitoring and email alerts, and administrator access only through a private network. The switch-over was done at night with an interruption of a few minutes, and the data was checked record by record afterwards.

We also fixed performance and reliability problems in the application. The heaviest museum page was slow because it looked up thousands of files that did not exist on the shared storage; we found the cause and measured the improvement. We corrected a fault that could mark a valid ticket as expired on slow networks, and made one museum's offline download more reliable.

The platform serves many museums from a single system and runs on supported software with monitoring that reports each problem once, by email. The heaviest museum page now loads in a small fraction of its former time.

We continue to maintain the platform and to develop it with the client's own developer, including a new front end and offline audio on iOS.