I do a live classical music radio show weekly, which I record, edit, and send for another broadcast out of state. This week, although I thought I had a handle on the recording level (trying to avoid getting into the red zone volume-wise), I ended up with a recording that had a lot of intermittent red zones with static and crackling sounds. I think I’ve tried everything to dampen down the sound in these passages-envelope tool, noise reduction, etc, amplify, but nothing seems to work to eliminate those unwanted sounds. Do I just have to scrap the recording? With amplify, I drag the bar to the left to make the volume softer in those passages, but somehow it often seems to make the passage louder and onscreen, the volume “looks” bigger. Pls, could use any advice. Thanks.
Possibly. 
Technically, it’s impossible to know the original shape & height of a clipped (distorted) wave.
But there is a Clip Fix effect that you can try. If you’re hearing static & crackling the clipping is very-bad.
Lowering the volume doesn’t remove the distortion.
With digital recording you can leave lots of headroom without loosing quality, especially if you have a 24-bit interface. Then you can normalize (or limit/compress) after recording to bring-up the volume.
If you remember analog tape, it was more forgiving when you go into the red, but digital has MUCH more dynamic range so you can go lower and of course you don’t get tape noise at low levels.
…In general, compression and limiting “push down” the peaks or loud parts, but then make-up gain is used to bring-up the overall loudness. (With classical you might want to avoid or minimize the limiting/compression to retain the dynamics.)
For live recording/events where levels are unpredictable it’s fairly common to use a limiter on the analog side. ( It has to be on the analog side because it’s too late after the analog-to-digital converter has clipped.)
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