nzilbb.vowels
A vowel-analysis package trimming dependencies after an email address got it archived.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
massProps vs prospectr
A side-by-side editorial comparison of massProps and prospectr — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
massProps vs prospectr: at a glance
What is massProps?
A mass-properties rollup spends a year on documentation and follows its sibling's API
massProps computes mass, centre of mass and inertia tensors — and their uncertainties — over tree-structured assemblies, the calculation systems engineers run on a spacecraft or vehicle breakdown. It sits on top of rollupTree, the same author's generic recursive-computation engine, and its most recent release exists only to adopt accessor functions that sibling added two weeks earlier.
What is prospectr?
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
prospectr provides the signal-processing layer for near-infrared and visible spectroscopy in R — Savitzky-Golay and gap-segment derivatives, standard normal variate, detrending, continuum removal, splice correction, plus calibration sampling algorithms like Kennard-Stone and DUPLEX and readers for ASD and BUCHI NIRCal instrument files. The May release is the substantial one: a long list of corrections to functions that were returning wrong or missing values rather than failing.
massProps vs prospectr: editorial side-by-side
massProps
0.0INFRA · APIS
A mass-properties rollup spends a year on documentation and follows its sibling's API
◆ Current state
massProps computes mass, centre of mass and inertia tensors — and their uncertainties — over tree-structured assemblies, the calculation systems engineers run on a spacecraft or vehicle breakdown. It sits on top of rollupTree, the same author's generic recursive-computation engine, and its most recent release exists only to adopt accessor functions that sibling added two weeks earlier.
◆ Where it's heading
Every release in the window is documentation, benchmarks, or keeping in step with rollupTree. The inertia tensor and radius-of-gyration uncertainty equations have been reformatted and re-explained three separate times, which suggests the hard part of this package is not the computation but making the covariance treatment legible to the engineers meant to trust it. Development effort clearly sits in the engine underneath, not here.
◆ Prediction
The pattern is unambiguous: rollupTree ships an API change and massProps follows within a fortnight. Whatever the engine does next is what appears here next, and on this evidence it will arrive as a one-line release note.
prospectr
0.0INFRA · APIS
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
◆ Current state
prospectr provides the signal-processing layer for near-infrared and visible spectroscopy in R — Savitzky-Golay and gap-segment derivatives, standard normal variate, detrending, continuum removal, splice correction, plus calibration sampling algorithms like Kennard-Stone and DUPLEX and readers for ASD and BUCHI NIRCal instrument files. The May release is the substantial one: a long list of corrections to functions that were returning wrong or missing values rather than failing.
◆ Where it's heading
The recent work is corrective rather than additive, and several items changed results silently before being caught. continuumRemoval() derived its convex-hull boundary offset from a fixed one-wavelength assumption that broke for fine-resolution spectra or non-nanometre units; cochranTest() passed an invalid argument name to prcomp() and produced incorrect principal component scores; readASD() silently dropped spectra in one branch of its text path. Two file readers were leaking connections. Alongside that runs a smaller thread of decoupling preprocessing steps from each other, most visibly detrend() gaining an snv argument so polynomial detrending can run without the SNV transform that Barnes et al. bundled with it.
◆ Prediction
The detrend() decoupling is the only recent addition and it fits a broader pipeline-composition direction, so similar separation of other bundled preprocessing steps is the plausible next move. The misspelled substraction argument now carries a deprecation warning, which schedules its removal for a future release.
Alternatives to massProps and prospectr
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either massProps or prospectr.
emuR
The R half of the EMU speech database system, fixing what was quietly broken.
BAS
A Bayesian model-averaging package spending its 2.0 on memory, not methods.
tidyplots
tidyplots keeps rebuilding its own foundations rather than layering around them.
GencoDymo2
A GENCODE annotation toolkit spent its first year getting out of CRAN's way.
sits
An R package for satellite time series just grew a Python API.
See all massProps alternatives → · See all prospectr alternatives →
Recent activity from massProps and prospectr
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoprospectrdetrend() can run without a prior SNV transformation
- 2mo agoprospectrContinuum removal, SNV and cochranTest corrected; readers stop leaking
- 6mo agomassPropsSwitched to rollupTree's new row accessors
- 6mo agomassPropsError in the inertia tensor uncertainty documentation
- 1y agomassPropsBenchmark results and equation layout cleaned up
- 1y agomassPropsCombine functions given consistent formal parameters
- 1y agoprospectrread_nircal() sample ID field fix
- 1y agomassPropsExamples shrunk to fit CRAN runtime limits
- 3y agoprospectrNon-UTF8 sample IDs no longer become NA
- 4y agoprospectrkenStone() bug fix
- 4y agoprospectrread_nircal() execution failure fixed
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between massProps and prospectr?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. massProps and prospectr are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is massProps better than prospectr?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. massProps and prospectr are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to massProps?
Top massProps alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "massProps alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/massprops for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to prospectr?
Top prospectr alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "prospectr alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/prospectr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.