Bandcamp Collection Download

The process to download your purchases from Bandcamp is not very user friendly. From their purchases view the user has to click the download album button, which opens a new tab. In the new tab one needs to wait until the link is ready to be clickable, after which one can download a zip of the album. The zip file needs to be extracted to the local disc and possibly put in its respective folder. Especially if one wants to download multiple albums this process is very tedious. The cli in this repository is what I use to download my purchases to my local disc.

The cli utilizes typer as UI (mostly because I wanted to check it out).

The albums will be downloaded with the structure library/artist/album/{track,album_art}

Downloading an album happens asyncronously, so all the files are downloaded simultaneously, but one album at a time.

installation

The bcdl cli can be installed by running

$ pip install git+https://github.com/s6angrev/bcdl.git

or by cloning the repo first:

$ git clone https://github.com/s6angrev/bcdl.git
$ cd bcdl
$ pip install bcdl/

You can always still run it directly without installing by replacing the bcdl command with python bcdl/__init__.py, assuming the required packages are installed.

setup

After cloning the repo and installation of requirements.txt (possibly in a virtual environment) you can run

$ bcdl configure

You will be asked to setup 2 values needed for interactions with your bandcamp collection:

• fan_id: you can find this if you are logged into you account and go to https://bandcamp.com/api/fan/2/collection_summary
• identity cookie: got to the storage section of you browser while logged into bandcamp, look for the cookie with the name identity and copy its value.

Finally you can specify a custom path where you want to download your music to.

All this info will be saved in a file config.json and can be manually updated later.

locally caching your collection

Once you set up your configuration you can download your collection by running

$ bcdl update-collection

download albums from your collection

If you run

$ bcdl view-collection

you will see a list of your albums with the timestamp when you bought. Every purchase has a number that you use to specify the list of items you want to download. The prompt expects a comma sepaparated list, a number range like 3-7 or combination of the two. Example:

choose albums to download by number: 0, 3-7, 9, 10

Note: a track is only downloaded if a file by that name doesn't exist yet. If you want to redownload a track you have to delete it first.

download an album from url

An alternative way to download an album is to specify the url directly:

bcdl download https://soulglophl.bandcamp.com/album/songs-to-yeet-at-the-sun