Not trying to argue, just understand the trade-offs in the ways to store cover art...
As a test, I checked the separate folder where I keep cover art, and found 316.6MB used for 4995 .jpg files, so 1000 images averages 63MB.
Then I checked a sample of music files (all artists starting with "S") and found 26.9GB for 5966 .mpg files, so 1000 tracks averages 4.5GB.
So, in my test sample, image storage is 63/4500 or about 1.4% of music storage. That's fine.
However, most of the images are album covers shared by multiple music files (one image used by every track on an album, and sometimes by even more tracks -- artist photo, for instance). Wouldn't the space devoted to images increase by 10-times or more if there was a separate image for most tracks? This would have a big impact on some libraries (I have 80K tracks and growing, though fewer than half are likely to ever have an associated image.) Is there any MC-side difference in storage space when an image is stored inside a music file vs. separately? (Of course, there's some difference due to how a particular drive allocates space to individual files.)
My biggest concern, and reason for storing images separately, is making sure image files are EXCLUDED from my iPods. I keep running out of space and having a variety of synch problems, even though there should be plenty of space for the number of tracks I synch. After a failure, when I check with iTunes, I discover half the drive is full of images, even though I tried to exclude them from the synch. The only recourse is to reinitialize the drive and resynch which takes 17+ hours. If I was 100% sure images stored IN music files on my desktop would NOT be sent to my iPod, I'd switch to embedded cover art. Am I overlooking something?