Bulk Download Your Entire Bandcamp Collection with Batchcamp Browser Extension
The Batchcamp Chrome and Firefox Browser Extension allows you to download your entire Bandcamp Collection in just as few clicks
I’ve pretty much settled on Bandcamp as my main source for buying digital audio files. The platform has long been a favorite of indie artists and labels due to their fair distribution of revenue from music sales (physical and digital).
The artist friendly attitude at Bandcamp is further enhanced by the ongoing Bandcamp Friday campaign, which increases the artist share from their usual 82% to an unmatched 93%, with the remaining 7% used by the platform to cover the cost of processing fees.
Those of us with fan accounts also benefit from Bandcamp’s huge variety of releases in physical and digital formats. I’ve had more than one Bandcamp fan account over the years, and in that time my format preferences have shifted as my listening habits have evolved. One result of that fickleness is that my digital music library is in multiple formats and scattered around on multiple hard drives.
I have some Bandcamp purchases downloaded as MP3, some are downloaded as AIFF, some FLACs, some WAVs. Some albums are added to my Headless Plex server, some are being stored on external USB drives… You get the idea; It’s a mess.
What I need to do is:
Combine all of my Bandcamp purchases to a single account
Download my entire Bandcamp collection in AIFF format
Update the Metadata for each of my downloaded Bandcamp purchases
Bandcamp doesn’t make that second task (bulk download my entire Bandcamp collection in a single format) very easy. The Bandcamp UI requires that you choose to download each album individually by navigating to the release page, selecting a format, then clicking download.
At best that’s 3 clicks for each release. Even more if you include having to navigate back to the collection page to select the next purchase for download. One of my accounts has 144 purchases associated, so that’s 144 x 3 = 432 clicks. There’s no way I’m going to sit here and entertain that level of tedium.
Luckily, a third-party developer has written a Chrome and Firefox browser extension to do all the boring stuff for me.
Huge shoutout to @hyphmongo for taking the time to create Batchcamp. It’s a super simple Chrome or Firefox extension that allows you to select items from your Bandcamp collection in bulk and download them all in the same format in one go.
This essentially means that I’m able to download all 144 releases from one of my collections with 3 clicks. Amazing.