How to make an audible spectrum with Audacity and the Accesstrum plug-in

1. you have to download and install Audacity (optionally portable).
2. copy the rjh-accesstrum.ny into the plug-in folder (see Audacity manual)
3. start Audacity, go to Effects -> add or remove plug-ins and search for rjh-accesstrum and enable it.
4. import the sound you want to analyze
5. select a portion of just a few seconds and trim it (Control+T)
6. arrow once left (to deselect the time range), Shift+Home selects to the start of the track -> delete to remove the silence.
7. tracks -> mix and render -> mixdown to mono if it isn't already. 
8. Tracks -> resample to 40960 Hz or 81920 if it has ultra high content. This gives nice straight frequency values for the text.
9. Select all (Control+A)
10. edit -> clip boundaries -> split 
11. effects -> repeat (1 copy)
12. alt+period should select the second   clip

Note that you could do all the triming (and glueing) in Reaper and use Audacity just for the resampling and making of the spectrum. I have for instance Audacity defined as secondary external editor in the preferences.

13. effects -> Accesstrum.
14. A higher window size gives you more frequency bins and also a longer sound. If you can't hear the peak difference good enough, use a higher contrast. The bin difference is sample rate (e.g. 40960) divided by window size (e.g. 2048 -> 20 Hz distance).
15. If you want the numerical values, press debug instead of OK. Copy the whole content of the window into a spreadsheet. 
16. Listen to the created spectrum and undo if necessary and try with other parameters. 

Note that the contrast is not reflected in the values.

Good luck