What's new in v1.2.0

This is the release where VFxM stops telling you where things go.

Arrange the window the way you work

The five panels — Preview, Favorites, Notes, Plugins and Filters — are no longer fixed in place. Drag any panel by its tab to move it, dock it beside another, or drop it onto another so the two share one area and become tabs you switch between. Drag the dividers to resize. Close what you do not use.

Whatever you build is remembered: panel positions, sizes, which are hidden, and whether their tab bars are showing. It comes back the same way after closing VFxM, and after quitting REAPER entirely.

• View → Reset Layout, or 0, puts everything back to the default arrangement.
• 1–5 hide and show the five panels. A hidden panel returns to its own area rather than turning up as a tab somewhere else.
• V hides the tab bar of whichever panel is under the mouse, for a cleaner frame; A does it to all of them at once. An area holding more than one panel always keeps its tabs, because they are the only way to reach what is behind.

Note

Your existing layout is reset once on first launch, with a note saying so. That is deliberate — the old fixed arrangement has no equivalent in the new docking system, so everyone starts from the same known-good default.

A shortcut for everything, and you choose the key

REAPER users work at the keyboard, so VFxM now does too. Every action has a single-key shortcut, and every one of them can be changed in Settings → Shortcuts.

Press H for the full list inside VFxM — showing the keys you have actually bound, not the defaults.

The keys you will reach for most:

Q / W	Library / Active FX
S	jump into the search box
F	find the selected plugin in the list
X	clear every filter and the search
1–5	show or hide each panel
0	reset the layout

Changing one is two clicks and a keypress: click the key beside an action, press the key you want. A key already in use is refused and the row tells you which action has it, so nothing silently ends up double-bound. Reset returns one action to its default and tells you on hover which key that is.

Banks on the number row

Favorite banks arrived in 1.1.1. Reaching one meant opening the selector and clicking. Now:

• F1–F7 go straight to a bank.
• B steps to the next bank that actually holds something, wrapping at the end. It skips empty banks, because landing on an empty one reads as the key having failed.

The folder button at the left of the tab row now shows which bank you are on, as a number beside the icon. Two banks can share a colour and an uncoloured bank had nothing to identify it at all; the number always does.

Reordering banks is also legible now. Bank names are positional — Bank 3 is whatever sits third — so a swap used to renumber both rows instantly and look like nothing had happened. The two rows now keep the numbers they arrived with for a moment, then fade into their new ones, so you see the bank travel and then settle.

macOS function keys

If F1–F7 change screen brightness or volume instead of switching banks, turn on Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys in System Settings → Keyboard.

Fixed: a finished trial no longer takes REAPER with it

Please read this one if you have ever run the trial.

If your trial had run out — or if VFxM could not read its trial file at all, which could happen after a reinstall or a move to another machine — VFxM would still step in front of REAPER’s own FX window. It closed that window and put itself up in its place, with nothing it could offer. The result was being unable to open any effect, including in a project you had already saved.

VFxM now asks a different question before it stands in front of REAPER: not “has the trial definitely expired?” but “am I definitely entitled to be here?” Licensed, or a trial genuinely running, and nothing else. A trial that has ended, one that was never started, and a trial file that cannot be read all mean the same thing — VFxM leaves REAPER’s FX windows completely alone and REAPER behaves exactly as if VFxM were not installed.

Nothing about the trial itself changed. It still runs its full length, still locks VFxM’s own features when it ends, and still shows you where to buy. It simply no longer takes your DAW down with it.

Smaller things

• Filters recovers its width. Narrowing the window took space from the Filters column and never gave it back, leaving labels stuck reading “Develop” and “Categor”. Widening the window now restores it.
• Nothing clipped at any size. The window will not shrink past the point where the toolbar is readable, and the shortcut list measures its own column so a longer name is never cut off by the key beside it.
• What’s New stays inside its own frame. On a shorter display the panel’s checkbox and OK button could be laid out past its own background. The notes now scroll inside the panel and the buttons are always fully visible.
• The window no longer disappears. On macOS, switching to another application could leave VFxM apparently gone. It now stays where you left it and simply sits behind the application you moved to.
• A cleaner Windows install. The installer no longer carries a set of stray macOS metadata files into your fonts folder, and is 2 MB smaller for it.
• One copy of the plug-in, not two. The macOS installer left a second copy behind in the system-wide folder. REAPER loaded both, and could end up running the older one after an update. Only one is installed now.

Upgrading

Install over the top; your favourites, banks, thumbnails, notes, categories and licence all carry across. The only thing that resets is the panel layout, once, for the reason above.