I have finally started using my new mac based on apple silicon, and I am pretty eager to get rid of my old mac running windows software in a virtual machine. Your tip on the "clip gain" feature is gold, thank you very much. It does what I wanted to do, just in a much easier way than before.
I have installed Audacity, and I am sure it is good software, I just don't find it very intuitive, and I really do not like having to "export" the wav file instead of just saving it. But I will use it for some things here and there, I suppose.
Older versions of Audacity would allow editing a WAV file "in place" and would just save the edits in the Audacity work file, if the user set preferences that way. Users still had to do an "export" to save their work in a meaningful file format though, so the the original file was not changed.
But they probably had LOTS of people complaining that their sessions were incomplete, after moving or renaming an original WAV, or even renaming a containing-folder (which affects the path name).
Because Audacity stores its work files as a lot of small files, the only way to get useful formats out is to "Export" at this time.
The advantage is that it's free, and runs on mac, linux and Windows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you ever have the need to join a number of individual .wav files back into a single file, it's so easy with Audition/Cooledit. Open the first file. Select "Open Append" and then select all the files (in order) that you want to have joined. Click "OK" and it's done.
Mac users can JOIN audio files using xACT under the SHNTOOL tab