How to balance recording en-mass

Hey, I am terribly new to Audacity (just started using it a week ago) and I’m still trying to understand it’s many functions. A heads up the number settings on Effects still confuse me regarding their parameters and how to read them.

Currently I’m doing a mono recording with my voice, however I am running into the personal issue where sometimes I speak too loud or speak too quietly. I am uncertain what function I should use to balance it. Am I supposed to use Normalize for the loud parts only, Amplify for the quiet parts, or something else? Can I apply these effects to the entire recording, or must I highlight only specific sections in fear of ruining the other sections which are fine?

Additionally, I notice that when I speak I hear cracks and pops from my own voice during the silence between words and sentences. Does anyone have any advice regarding that?

If you are looking to produce professional quality voice recordings (for example, audiobooks), you need to fix the problem at source - practice maintaining a consistent delivery in the way that you read.

If you don’t need professional voice recording quality, but just need something that doesn’t sound too bad on YouTube, then you could try using the “LevelSpeech2.ny” plug-in (see this post: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/improved-leveling-for-speech/33258/27).