does that essentially mean erase it and record
Not always. It is unfortunate if your natural presentation includes high, needle-like peaks in the blue waves, but that’s not deadly. That can respond to Effect > Limiter whose job it is to squash those peaks in preference to the overall volume. I don’t remember if Limiter is included in the stock Audacity.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/limiter.html
RMS - 29.1,
That’s loudness.
If those relationships are too far off, you’ll never get there. Fixing one can kill the others. That’s why it’s important to get close in the original recording. Too much processing is actually an ACX AudioBook failure. So no you can’t beat your show with a stick and submit it because it passes our analysis tools.
The goal is listening to someone across the kitchen table from you, not a cellphone call.
I have a very quiet third bedroom and I have created several voice pieces that needed minimal processing to make ACX Compliance. One of them with the built-in microphone on my laptop.
Koz