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Comment by tweetle_beetle | Hacker News Reader

I quite like how spartan and transparent Bandcamp is when it comes to most things. Discovery through other users has been great and (afaik) there is no blackbox algorithm - "this user bought 12 things you have", great I might find something by looking at what else they bought.

The quality of the recommendations is high, because 90% of music can be listened to in full in advance. So users only make purchases when they have a genuine interest. And fake results are less likely, because you can see purchase history.

The official recommendations from the Bandcamp articles tend not to be of interest to me and the chart categories just get saturated by passionate fans of niche genre artists in my experience, but the user graph is refreshingly simple.

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The only thing I really don't like about Bandcamp is their lack of an API and the consequent difficulty of automatically downloading purchased albums.

youtube-dl (and yt-dlp) supports downloading from Bandcamp, but I'm not sure if it supports downloading anything other than the publicly-available low-quality MP3s. This[1] Reddit post seems like it may work if you capture your login cookie.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/lge576/using_coo...

Yeah, I wasn't able to find any way for yt-dlp to download the HQ zipfiles either.

Having bought a few artist compilation on it, after clicking 5 links manually I resorted to writing a script to parse the webpage and get the links there.

But what's even worse is that their CDN throttles your IP after ~15 downloads and you have to wait 1-2 hours before you can download again (which I've already hit a few times, even while clicking on the links manually)

Thanks! That's good to know - I've already built out authentication in the Puppeteer-based sync tool I'm working on, but haven't yet got further, and it'll help a lot once I do to know to account for this.

Granted, that means still a third step to orchestrate - auth ending in cookie capture, then album list fetch and reconciliation, and finally (on the other end of some queue) album downloading. Thank goodness they didn't make it too simple, I guess - I'd have hated for their annoyingly inconsistent login captcha to have been the last arbitrary challenge I had to overcome.

(I can't fairly give them too hard a time, I suppose - they're doing an incredible amount with a tiny team and in that context even having pulled their public API is reasonable, however much I wish they hadn't. Just that it'd be nice if they had the scope for dealing with use cases that aren't the adversarial mirroring they've clearly optimized against...)

CRON the DL?

I really, really hope that Epic doesn't ruin it.

Epic seems to have bought it for the relationships Bandcamp has within the music community -- they see Fortnite as a multiverse, and they've already hosted a couple of concerts. The Bandcamp and Harmonix acquisitions seem to be feeding into that, so hopefully they won't ruin the existing products in the process.

I suspect the real answer is even more cynical: Epic bought Bandcamp to make a point in their fight with Google (and Apple) over in-app billing.

https://9to5google.com/2022/04/30/epic-games-bandcamp-androi...

I feel like that'd be the least bad reason to buy it.

Epic's only interest in it appears to be to pad out their litigation. I expect they'll lose interest in it if they can bribe and sue their way into making it easier to get gambling in the hands of pre-teens.

I am sure they will shorten tracks to samples without logins or try a subscription model. I am just waiting for the platform to go sour. I recently downloaded Soulseek again after 20 years. It feels like we’ve gone full circle. I like Apple Music but I want to have copies of my music on disk.

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