There have been some complaints recently that the lesson download functionality doesn’t work anymore. However, I have a workaround for this, and I have obtained permission from @BanjoBen to post this workaround for all to see.
Please note that this workaround is only valid if you have a desktop or laptop you’re using; Android and iOS users won’t be able to replicate this (at least without majorly hacking your device). I have tested this on Linux and Windows; this should work for macOS and ChromeOS as well, but I’m unable to test those. If you get those working, let me know and I’ll update this post. Also keep in mind that this isn’t guaranteed to work 100% of the time: I wasn’t able to get my demo lesson to download on Windows, but another lesson downloaded just fine.
Prerequisites
- You will need to install Firefox on your device. As far as I know, Firefox is the only major browser on which Banjo Ben’s site will attempt to download the videos at all, although it won’t load lessons while offline.
- A willingness to get your fingers a little bit dirty in your computer.
The workaround
Begin by downloading any lesson in Firefox. I’m going to demonstrate on the lesson Using scale to create rhythm walks. Once the lesson has downloaded, open a new Firefox tab, type about:profiles into the address bar, and press Enter. You will see a page that looks something like this:
Find the profile that is marked as the profile in use (normally this will be default-release). Click the Open Directory button next to the Root Directory entry. This opens the Firefox cache folder, which is where Firefox stores things like your settings, temporary files, and downloaded lesson videos. In this folder, open default, then https+++banjobenclark.com, then idb. At this point, you will be confronted with at least one folder:
You will need to try each folder in turn. In my experience, you will likely have two folders; the second one is likely the one you need. You are looking for a folder that has a number of files that are named with consecutive numbers. Here’s mine:
Once you have found the proper folder, you will need to add a file extension to each file. For me, this is fairly easy, because my file explorer detected what each file is. However, you may have to manually figure out which each file is.
Fear not: the files are downloaded in a predictable order: videos first, then MP3s, then PDF/TEFs, each in the order that they are listed in on the lesson page. In this case, we have 6 videos, 0 MP3s, 2 PDFs and 2 TEFs. I can now rename the file 100 to Lesson Preview.mp4. NOTE: you must have the .mp4 on the end of the name, or your computer may not be able to understand what kind of file it is! The rest of the files map to the other videos in the lesson; after skipping the (nonexistent) MP3s, we can rename each PDF and TEF; 106 becomes PDF Tab - Lesson.pdf, 107 becomes TEF Tab - Lesson.tef, and so forth and so on. Once done, my folder looks like this:
Yours will obviously look different based on what lesson you just downloaded.
Now all that is left is to move all of these files to a new folder in your personal files! I also generally add a number to the beginning of each video name so they are sorted in the proper order in my file manager. At any rate, you should end up with a folder that looks like this:
Congratulations! You have beaten the system and retrieved a lesson for offline viewing! Unfortunately this workaround will never be quite as good as the intended download functionality, but it’s a lot better than nothing!
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