It's up to you to get a feel how you like to do things.
Compression will change the dynamics of the recording, the relationship of the quiet and loud parts to each other. Changing the gain or normalizing will affect the whole recording equally, and that sounds more like what you want to do.
I haven't found an effective way to repair clipping, maybe some others can help you with that. You want the max gain of the recording safely below 0dB when recording, once it's made, you can decrease the gain if you want, but the damage is done. Your max peaks are already 0dB if you've got clipping, so you'd have to normalize to some lower value, which would really only be necessary if the recording was gratingly loud.
For splitting tracks:
http://www.milosoftware.com/cdwave/cdwav193.exeIt's up to you if you want to fade it in and out, I don't really see the point. Sometimes less is more.