I can't say I've ever had to leave the game to use a spectrograph once and I've been playing it since the first Alpha.
Do you actually have the sound messages from the UA in your inbox and your just unable to get any further in ED because leaving the game and downloading Audacity would kill your immersion?
It's not as though you'd even be stuck if you were following the "story" entirely within the game as Galnet also contains clues in plain English.
I didn't say that. That is not what I said. I did not say that. I'm sorry but your point is a total strawman.
There are many parts of the game where leaving to use an out of game tool to do something outside of a basic function is almost mandatory. A spectrograph is just one smaller reason out of a number of other much bigger, every day gameplay reasons, such as looking for basic trade information that should be in the game, long range route planning, EDShipyard, Inara (because the engineer in game interface is utterly useless for complex planning)
AND the biggest one of all - a bearing calculator.
You don't HAVE to use these tools but when engaging in something like complex Engineer planning, you have to use an out of game tool because the in-game tools just don't cut it, the information has to be gained from outside the game. It is a lesson in stupid frustration trying to line up cords on a planet manually without using a simple out of game bearing calculator to pin point for you. It would actually bring gameplay and ship interaction into the game to give better cord/bearing/planet mapping.
And again, there is little to no point in white knighting these issues away and pretending these are not issues with the game. FD have acknowledge the problems.
The game needs more in game science, more in game analysis, more in game interaction with your sensors and navigation. Actually having to analyse stolen trade data, or listen or spectral analyse a star for science missions, hack with your computer into a navigation point to gain information that needs to be run through your spectrograph to gain the location of the bounty you're hunting (with rewards that make the bounty missions worth your time and effort) rather than pointing your ship at the probe for 4 seconds.
The game is just crying out of decent game play interaction!