Small Project-Big Frustration

I’m a new user to Audacity, and was directed to use it to edit short digital recorded conversations that could be hosted on my company’s website and SharePoint site as “podcasts”. They aren’t really podcasts as they aren’t being downloaded to a USB-based MP3 player, but I digress.
My need is simple:
1.take the MP3 of the conversation, compress it and level the audio ( I found a tutorial with good instructions for doing that).
2.Cut out any obvious vocal hitches (uhhs and umms).
3.Have a five-second musical “bumper” at the head and tail of the conversation.

What I’ve had trouble with is cleaning up the audio (#2 above) and adding the music. I have MP3 files of some classical music to use as my bumpers, but the only tutorial instructions I found within Audacity had the music being in the background of the whole conversation and following its peaks and valleys, which is WAY more than I want or need for my purposes.

I am hopeful that another member of this forum can provide me with some basic instructions for just adding the music at the beginning and end of the audio track. Thank you.

If at all possible, avoid using MP3 (or any other compressed format) during the production process. MP3 encoding always discards some amount of sound quality. While that is probably acceptable at the end of the task for your final export, you don’t want to be losing sound quality every step of the way.

This tutorial covers most of the basic editing that you might need: Audacity Manual
and here’s one about mixing a voice track with background music: Audacity Manual