I’ve been using audacity for quite some time and find it quite useful. I do simple editing of mp3 files mostly and export them when finished back to mp3. Lately I’ve been adding album artwork to the meta data of my mp3 files. My one issue with Audacity is when I finish editing an mp3 file (normally I just normalize and truncate silence) and export it, the export file no longer contains the album artwork in the meta data. Then I have to add it back in, which can be quite time consuming if I’m working with numerous files from various artists. Is there a way to set up Audacity to retain the album artwork when exporting from mp3 format to mp3 format?
thanks! 
You may be a victim of Audacity’s insistence on divorcing the import and export music. Did you notice that Audacity doesn’t have a Clip Info button? That’s because the music inside Audacity has no relationship to the file you opened. I think that’s where your artwork is going.
Audacity has no idea what format you’re going to export and some of them don’t manage artwork. Also, what happens when you mix two different albums into one export?
A word on Exporting and MP3. Audacity creates a whole new MP3 when it exports and also doubles the compression sound damage when it does it. If you’re doing some very simple cutting or editing, you may be further ahead by using an up-front MP3 editor instead of a sound project editor. That may preserve the artwork, too.
We used to recommend MP3Splt, but there have been complaints about ads or other problems.
Koz
The short answer is no, Audacity does not support id3 Artwork.
There is a brief overview of Audacity’s Metadata support in the FAQ: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/FAQ:Opening_and_Saving_Files#meta
I presume that you would like to vote in favour of Album Art support, so I have added your vote to:
“Support lyrics and album art in metadata tags where the format supports this so these are not simply lost when you import and export the file”
Thank you Koz. Very helpful. I’ll try the mp3 split program. Does that program also have the option to normalize files? I do that function also
Thank you Steve. I guess I’m stuck then until they decide to add that feature. Would happen to know of a program that would support truncating and normalizing without losing the album artwork?
all the best,
Mark
I don’t expect Artwork to be supported any time soon as it is not a standard id3 tag and is implemented in different ways in different programs.
Try mp3DirectCut http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html
Thanks again Steve.
Best Regards,
Mark