Installation & Setup

Install Bandcamper by searching for it on the Chrome web store and clicking the 'Add to Chrome' button. Once that is done, the extension needs some information about your account. It will get this information automatically when you log in and visit your profile page.

So, login, visit your profile page (where your music collection is) and you're good to go. If you like, you can do a bit of tweaking on the options page.

Toolbar Button

Left click the Bandcamper toolbar button to display the extension popup window. From this window, you can view your user details and use the quick-links to navigate to your most frequently used areas on the site. The quick-links can be edited on the options page.

Image of the toolbar button Image of the popup

Downloader

When you navigate to your own collection page, you will find the Bandcamper download bar next to Bandcamp's own search box. On the download bar, you will find the following controls:

Image of the download bar

Download Button

Once you have selected the items you want, click here to download them. If a batch has items that failed to complete (due to a network interruption, for example) this button will become the 'retry' button, and clicking it will attempt to download the failed items only.

Format Selector

Bandcamp provides you with a number of format options. Choose the format for the files you want to download, here. In the current version of Bandcamper, only single-format downloading is available. Multi-format downloading might become available in a future version.

Select All

Clicking this button selects all visible items. Like the individual selectors, its function is additive, meaning that you can use Bandcamp's search feature to find one or more items, click 'select all' to select all of these items, search again for some different items, click 'select all', and the two selections will be combined in union (if an item is in both search sets, it will will not be downloaded twice). Clicking 'select all' while it is highlighted (while all visible items are selected) has a slightly different effect depending on whether or not you are in a search. If you are in a search, just the search results will be removed from your selection. Otherwise, all items will be removed, not only the visible ones.

Info Display

The info display gives you basic statistics about your collection, your selection, and about the current download status.

During Selection

Before you click the download button, the info display will tell you:

  • collection: The number of downloadable items in your collection.
  • showing: The number of downloadable items currently visible on the page.
  • selected: the number of items you have selected for download.

During Download

After you click the download button, the info display will tell you:

  • waiting: The number of items currently waiting to be downloaded.
  • downloading: The number of items currently being downloaded. You can set the maximum number of concurrent downloads on the options page. The default is 3.
  • completed: The current number of successfully completed downloads.
  • interrupted: The number of downloads that have failed, but that can be resumed from where they left off.
  • failed: The number of downloads that have failed and must be started again from scratch.

Tips on Downloading

Selecting Items for Download

When you visit your own profile page (while you are logged in), you will see that the bandcamp's 'download' link in the bottom-left corner of each downloadable collection item has been replaced with Bandcamper's 'select' control. Clicking this will select the item for download. Clicking it again will deselect the item. A selected item is indicated by a dashed blue outline.

Image of a selected item

Selecting a Range

You can select a range of items by selecting the first item in the range, then holding down the shift key and selecting the last item in the range. Any non-downloadable items in the range will be skipped over. Similarly, you can deselect a range by deselecting the first item you want to deselect, holding down the shift key, and selecting the last item. If the last item in the range is selected without selecting the first item, the first visible, downloadable item will be assumed to be the start of the range.

Selecting All

You can use the 'select all' button to select all visible items on the page. Bandcamp initially loads a limited number of collection items, and then loads more after you click the 'show all items' button at the bottom of the page, and as you scroll down. Bandcamper cannot select items that have not yet been loaded onto the page by Bandcamp. To ensure that your whole collection can be downloaded, click 'show all items' at the bottom of the page and scroll down until you hit the bottom.

Additive Selection

You can select items by scrolling through your collection, and combine this with multiple searches using Bandcamp's search facility, and all of your selections will be remembered.

Downloading

Once you have selected the items you want, select your desired format with the format selection drop-down and click the download button. A few things will happen:

  1. A badge showing the number of downloads waiting to be completed will appear on the Bandcamper toolbar button. This will decrement as downloads are completed.
  2. The info display will switch to display information about the batch download status.
  3. If your collection page is open in any other Chrome tab or window on your machine, these will also start to reflect this batch download state. Any selections that you had made on those pages will be cleared, and the selections for the current batch will be shown
  4. The selection and download controls will be disabled

Color Coding

The outlines around selected collection items are color-coded to reflect their download status. When the item starts to download, its outline will change from a dashed blue to solid blue line. Completed downloads are represented by a green outline, interrupted downloads are orange, and failed downloads are red. An alert sound will play when a single download completes (a whooping sound), when a single download fails (three quick bleeps) and when the whole batch is completed, with or without errors (a kind of sighing sound). These sounds can be turned off on the options page.

Image of a downloading item Image of a failed item Image of a completed item

Cancelling the Download

You can cancel a download batch at any point by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Shift + e (Ctrl + Opt + Shift + Escape on a Mac or Linux). Take note that this also clears your selection and resets the downloader to its initial state. Ctrl + Alt + Shift + e can also be used to free up the user interface should an error cause it to become unresponsive.

Retrying Failed Downloads

Once the batch has finished, the info display will show you how many failures there were, if any. If any items did fail to download, the big, blue download button will now be a big, orange retry button. Clicking it will retry the failed items only. Bandcamper will attempt to resume any partially downloaded items from where they left off. Otherwise, it will start the download again from scratch. If you don't want to retry the failed items, you can just press the Escape key to reset the downloader and return control to you.

All Good

If all downloads were completed successfully, or if you don't want to retry the failed items, press the Escape key to reset the downloader and return control.

Resetting the Downloader

Should the interface remain unresponsive after pressing the Escape key once a download has completed, pressing Ctrl + Alt + Shift + e (Ctrl + Opt + Shift + Escape on a Mac) will reset the downloader to its initial state.

Options

You can get to the options page by right-clicking on the toolbar button and selecting options from the context menu. You will find a set of tabs - one for general options and one for each module (currently, the downloader is the only available module).

General Options

  1. quick-links: Edit the target for the quick-links on the toolbar button popup. The label must be ten characters or less, and the target must be a page on the bandcamp website

Downloader Options

  1. max concurrent downloads: Set the number of items in a batch that can be downloaded at the same time. The default is 3.
  2. play audio notifications: Set whether audio notifications should be played when an individual download completes or fails, and when the whole batch is completed.