From the audacitity manual:
“Here’s the exception to the rule: If you have recorded in 16-bit and are only doing simple editing (cut, delete, paste, trim…) and not doing any processing (amplify, equalize, frequency filter…) then for highest accuracy dither can be set to “none”. In this case, because there are no 32-bit operations prior to export there is no benefit to using dither. Exporting a 16-bit track to 16-bit with dither set to “none” will be lossless. The same applies if exporting from a 24-bit track to an uncompressed 24-bit file format with dither disabled.”
source: Dither - Audacity Manual (audacityteam.org)
I also readed some threads here on the forum about people having problems when converting from flac to wav (or even from flac to flac, just exporting the opened file), size becoming bigger and bigger at each export.
Disabling the dithering (setting it from deafult “shaped” to “none”, solved the problem.
I then followed the suggestion and disabled it when doing simple modifications as stated in the manual.
However I checked out of curiosity, leaving the setting to shaped and the exported file remains the same.
Have this setting been automated? If that’s the case I’ll leave as default even when doing simple cutting/paste works on flac/wav files.