Volume levels and Compression

[alyricalmind]

Adobe Audition 3 has this great feature that when I highlight a piece of audio, a little volume knob pops up right next to it. Instead of compression, I use that a lot of times to fix the volume levels within a take... I'm just wondering, does that degrade the sound in anyway and is it an acceptable method to fix dynamics? I just highlight the audio, turn up/down the volume knob, and the program automatically applies the change destructively to the audio. Should I be using an aggressive compressor instead?