The focus of this report is on analysis methods that can be applied with little or no supervision, and that are suited to situations where little or no prior knowledge is available or used beyond assuming that the curves are exponential decays having one or more components. The methods discussed therefore do not attempt to determine which underlying model is most appropriate for the system measured. Rather, the emphasis is on methods that extract and convey the information objectively provided by the measurement in a manner suited to the purpose of the measurement. Envisioned applications include the use of nuclear magnetic relaxation measurements for automated process control, medical diagnostics, raw material screening, quality assurance, and numerous other situations. The methods are also valuable for fundamental and mechanistic investigations if essential limitations of multicomponent exponential decay analysis are considered. Emphasis is placed on numerically efficient and stable parameterizations that can pass results automatically to computers for further analysis. However, conveying information from the analyses to people expecting certain formats is also considered. Though the focus of this report is on magnetic resonance, multicomponent exponential decay curves arise in numerous other circumstances, and the methods advocated here are likewise broadly applicable. green line shows fitted distribution from SVD truncated to 14 components; orange spikes show amplitudes and rates of a small (11) basis parameter set fitted to the decay curve; purple spikes show discrete fit of five components using ARM+LSQ. (B) differences between decay curves generated by the fits in Panel A compared to the decay curve generated from the starting distribution. All parameterizations reproduce the original decay curve to within 2 parts in 10,000 or better, a higher precision than is often available from real-world measurements. Time and rate units are sec and sec -1 , respectively. The decay curve had 2001 evenly spaced points ranging from 0 to 10 seconds. Amplitudes in Panel A are arbitrarily scaled to allow comparison of parameterizations. Differences in Panel B are relative to a decay curve whose initial point is one arbitrary unit.