Can I force iTunes not to embed custom album art, but store it separately?

(I only use iTunes to manage my 16GB iPod nano 5th gen and update my mother's iPad.)
Now as far as I am aware, when iTunes downloads album art, it stores it separately from the audio files, and thus several tracks share the same image file for their artwork. This seems economical to me, considering the space limitations that most Apple devices have.
But if you set your custom album art, iTunes embeds it into the audio files themselves, so each has a copy of the artwork, and thus the total size of artwork increases about tenfold. Now this is okay when storing the audio files on personal computers, but is quite stupid for devices with limited storage capacities. It really depends on the size of the artwork and the bitrate your audio is encoded to, but I calculated I could put an extra 300MB of music onto my iPod if I could just somehow force iTunes to store my custom album art separately, not embed it into the audio files by default.
Does anybody have an answer/solution to this problem, or do I have to look beyond iTunes to do this?
Thanks!
(Note that I do not wish to use the iTunes download artwork service, as it is quite unreliable and the artwork is of low quality.)

Can I force iTunes not to embed custom album art, but store it separately?
No.
tt2

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E: Spelling
Message was edited by: psufan513
Message was edited by: Host

Welcome to the forums.
You must paste the album art into each and every song on the album -- in iTunes, select all the songs, press Ctrl-I, and go in and paste in the album art picture. This is the only way to do it. Make sure the album name and artist is the same for each song while you are at it (if not it won't work either).
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Can I force iTunes not to embed custom album art, but store it separately?

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