I’m curious about your reference to your friend who records in an odd way.
He’s the right-hand microphone in this two microphone shoot.

I was commissioned to shoot the Los Angeles half of a broadcast radio program, so my microphone is on the left and we double recorded it.
You can just barely see it, but his microphone is not aimed toward the performer’s chair. Someone figured out that you could get tonal and timber voice variations with this microphone by not aiming it correctly. So he routinely records his material with the microphone pointed toward the credenza rather than his mouth [cringe]. Because he also has that semi-circular sound baffle and good office sound-proofing, it works. He got lucky.
a link to a sound bite.
That’s the unfortunate appearance of using underscore as theatrical emphasis rather than a link.
If you have a reasonable sound system or good headphones, stop what you’re doing every so often and listen to the work. It should sound natural, it should sound like you and there should not be anything obvious left when you stop talking. It’s fun to dredge in exotic and hard to use filters and tools, but you should have realistic goals and the goal should not be “fun with filters.” I have been known to sleep on it and take it again fresh the next day.
You should fix failures such as the peak error thing. That one is real and it’s good to get a feel for how all the tools work.
If you want to be obsessive, you can exceed the ACX specifications (just not by too much). Careful reading is good.
measure between -23dB and -18dB RMS and have -3dB peak values and a maximum -60dB noise floor
Their words, but that’s actually not true. The ideal RMS (loudness) really is half-way between -23 and -18, and the maximum noise is -60, but the ideal peak value is less than -3. If you try to hit the peak value exactly it will make you crazy, particularly because conversion to ACX MP3 submission format can affect peak values.
Try that once. Create a “chapter,” process it, export as ACX standard MP3.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/i-passed-acxs-qc-but-the-end-result-sounds-horrible/42749/2
Scroll down to submission tricks.
Open the MP3 in a fresh Audacity and see what happened to ACX Test.
MP3 is a terrible production format. The volume, quality and duration of MP3 files changes.
I think ACX Test will complain if it can’t find at least a half-second of room tone to test noise. It may also not like really long submissions. Does it say anything about that in the download dialog?
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Analyze_Plug-ins#ACX_Check
Koz