I noticed that opening a FLAC in Goldwave 5.12 and saving it at the same compression ratio results in a saved file that differs in size from the original FLAC. For reference, the original FLACs are encoded at compression level 8. I open the file in Goldwave, don't edit or modify anything, and resave it at maximum compression, 16 bit, stereo (the same settings as the original). For just one example, the original FLAC was 50,130 KB, and the one saved through Goldwave is 50,125 KB.

Now, I'm not too worried, because I'm going back and forth from lossless to lossless. I'm more curious as to why the sizes are different. Perhaps Goldwave uses a different compression level, even though “maximum” should be equal to level 8 compression?

Might just be different padding.

Was the original FLAC file that you opened with Goldwave also created with Goldwave? Is is possible that a different compile and/or version of the FLAC encoder could produce slightly different filesizes?

The FLAC was made with flac.exe in Exact Audio Copy, so no, it wasn't made in Goldwave.

I think I figured it out, though. When I compare "size on disk," the FLAC that I saved from Goldwave is 4,096 bytes smaller. That's the padding size FLAC uses. Now, that leads me to another question: what are the drawbacks of this apparent reduction/elimination of the padding?

Changing/Adding a tag will require a rewrite of the file if there is no padding.

So at worst some speed loss from disk I/O.