Exported file is larger for no reasons

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

i copy a 52.9MB size 16 44 flac music track into my audacity version 233 (november 2019) portable

the track is 19min55sec ambient music

i trim a small bit of silence off the beginning and end and export the track as 16 44 flac with maximum level 8 compression

the exported 16 44 flac is 19min36sec and 68.4MB which is 15.5MB bigger

if anything the track should have exported as smaller not bigger

i dont remember ever having this problem in audacity before. usually the cut tracks export smaller

converting the flac in fre:ac program from flac to flac seems to have no effect on size whether its the smaller or bigger version

the files appear basically identical in the program SPEK.

2

Try temporarily disabling “dither” in “Preferences > Quality” (set “dither” to “None”).
Normally dither should be set to “shaped” for high quality conversion, so remember to change it back when you’re done. Full information about dither can be found here: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/dither.html

This workaround should not be necessary in the next version of Audacity.

3

it worked

the exported track was a tiny bit smaller in size (as it should be) after editing off the tiny bit of silence at the beginning and end

i dont remember ever having to do this for any other track before. the only difference i know about is i just started listening to ambient music so this might be the first very quiet slow light type track i exported. or the first time i noticed the size when exporting a quieter type of track

which version should i keep? the smaller one with no dither or the bigger one with the dither?

4

which version should i keep? the smaller one with no dither or the bigger one with the dither?

You don’t need dither unless you are reducing the bit depth.

And at 16-bits or higher it’s not THAT important one way or the other because under normal listening conditions you can’t hear dither or the lack of dither.

A 8-bits you can hear the dither noise, and without it you can hear quantization noise. I never work in 8-bits but there was a thread here a couple of weeks ago where the person preferred it without dither.

the only difference i know about is i just started listening to ambient music so this might be the first very quiet slow light type track i exported. or the first time i noticed the size when exporting a quieter type of track

Maybe…? Dither is noise and the randomness of noise makes it hard to compress. The louder music may already be more dense/complex and adding a little noise may not make it much harder to compress. And/or the louder music may already have noise. Almost anything recorded with a microphone has some acoustic and/or electrical background noise.