Silence at start?

Hey guys, I’m an electro house producer who works with the latest type of audacity for tidying up samples of audio.
I’ve never had this problem before, and I can’t figure out why it’s happening.
When I export a piece of audio (eg. a snare), Audacity inserts 0.047 seconds of sound at the start, and this is enough to throw my entire drum pattern out of time.
Has anyone else had this problem, and if so, how did you/can you fix this?
Thanks very much.

Did you miss a word or two?

When I export a piece of audio as an MP3…

MP3 is a video format. It’s full name is MPEG1, Layer 3 and it conforms to video framing constraints. never do production in MP3.

Yeah as an MP3. I used to only do WAV but I found that with the amount of samples I used, my RAM was being crushed so I had to use MP3.
Audacity is frustratingly putting in a little silence, and I can’t figure out why.

MP3 isn’t a continuous format. It has “frames” like film.
http://brennigjones.com/blog/wp-content/countdown_film.jpg

There’s no such thing as producing sound on a half-frame or 2/3 of a frame. The system will always build itself out to the next even, whole frame.

Never do production in MP3.

Koz