How to add a photo to an audio piece as background or cover?

Hi, as title. thanks.

Audacity doesn’t support embedded artwork. This also means that if you open and edit a file with artwork in Audacity, the new-exported copy will be missing the artwork.

I’m a Windows guy but iTunes can do it. Apple Music should be able to do it too.

Or look for a “tag editor” or “metadata editor”. (I use MP3Tag which is free for Windows but not free for MacOS.)

I have experience doing this with MP3TAG.

You use the Add Cover function. It allows most picture formats, but I would recommend only using jpeg, png, and gif formats because some people are going to have computers that don’t understand some of the other image formats. All three of these are compressed (provided the program that wrote the image file used compression). The png and gif images have loss-less compression The length of the audio file will be increased by the size of the picture.

Use pictures with a square aspect ratio, because some programs that render the embedded image will squish them into a square. Mastodon is the worst offender on this.

thank you, I’ll try.

Thank you. Actually I’ve done it in iTunes, it’s nice but when the piece transferred to some other Apps, the artwork just disappeared…

I think, iTunes (and Music.app) do not integrate the cover art, only a reference to it. The art itself is stored somewhere else in the database.

Use mp3tag for real integration of the artwork. The Mac version is worth its price (22 Swiss Francs here, would probably be around 25 US$ - unless it is charged by Mr. Trump’s customs duty). It has a 7 day trial period, if you download it from the website. Also available in the App store.

There’s also kid3, which is free and open source.