Exporting creates extra silence at beginning of file

As a big fan of music in general, I love albums that flow from one track to another, making the experience seem like one continuous song. There was one album, however, with a transition between two songs that included a small gap of silence, ruining the experience. After examining the two tracks in Audacity, I found the gap at the beginning of the second song, so I promptly removed it and exported the new file to replace the original in my library. After playing through again, though, I found the silence still existed.

After a lot of trial and error, I found that the simple act of exporting the file was creating a new space of silence about 0.4 seconds in length at the start of the track no matter what I did, so the problem is not with my music player. Has anyone else encountered this error?

To make matters worse, I had gone through this process with songs before and it had not created this issue. What’s more, ever since the first time it happened, other songs I have tried this with yielded the same error. I haven’t found any settings that enable or disable this… Any ideas on how to fix it?

See here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/when-i-export-to-mp3-audio-expands-by-a-little-bit/42967/1
and my reply: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/when-i-export-to-mp3-audio-expands-by-a-little-bit/42967/2