What's new in v1.2.3

A big one. Most of it is Active FX, the plugin list and the things around categories; the rest is a set of licensing messages that used to blame you for something that was not your fault.

Active FX shows everything you selected, at once

Select three tracks and three items and Active FX shows all six chains together — each track in track order, its items beside it, Master and Monitoring at the bottom. The view is two columns, tracks on the left and items on the right, so a track and the item sitting on it read as one row. However many you select, the list scrolls.

Every empty chain shows an (Empty) row, so there is always somewhere to drop a plugin.
Dragging near the top or bottom edge scrolls the list, so a chain below the fold is still a drop target.
The headers say what they point at — Track FX names the track, Item Take FX shows the item’s in and out time — and act on the whole section: Add an FX, Bypass All with a toggle that says which way it will go, or Alt-click the header to clear the section. Each is one undo.
Drag a plugin between any two sections — Track, Item Take and Monitoring FX, in all six directions. A plain drag copies; hold Alt to move.
The drop cue is back, and it is a bar. Dragging over a chain lights the gap between rows as a thick bar in the theme’s cue colour; an empty section lights its (Empty) row. 1.2.2 drew a box, then briefly nothing at all.

Insert on Master, at the slot you choose

Right-click a plugin in the list, in Favorites or on the preview card and pick Insert on Master…. A small picker shows the Master’s current chain with a place before each effect and one at the end. An empty Master still offers a spot.

Categories: dots or tags, and colours that stay apart

Settings → Browser → Show categories as switches the plugin list between the colour dots it has always shown and small tags that spell the category out beside the name. One or the other, in the same space; dots stay the default. Tags cost width, not height: on a narrow column you get as many as fit and a +N for the rest, with the full list in the tooltip. The tag is a solid fill with a dark or light label chosen for readability.
Every category has its own colour. Colours are generated so that categories close in hue are never close in lightness too — no more wall of amber, and no two categories sharing a shade. A colour you set yourself is never touched.
The Categorize window has two tabs — Categories and User-Defined — so your own categories are not hidden below the fold. K opens it for the current selection, and the key is printed beside Categorize in the right-click menu.
Cmd/Ctrl-click a category chip in Filters to file the whole selection into it. It adds; it removes only when every selected plugin already has that category, so one click never splits a mixed selection.
Removing a plugin’s only category files it under Other. Before, the window put the category straight back and nothing seemed to happen.
The list’s Color button is one button: greyed and dimmed when category colouring is off, in the theme’s button colour when it is on.

Shortcuts are no longer inside Settings. A Shortcuts menu on the top bar opens with Export Shortcuts and Import Shortcuts, then Edit Shortcuts… and the help window, then every binding by group with its key beside it.

Export and import move a set of shortcuts between machines. Import replaces the whole set rather than merging, so a machine never ends up with half of one layout and half of another; anything the file does not name goes back to its default. An action this build does not have, a key that cannot be bound, or a key claimed twice is refused and counted, and the count is shown.
Undo and Redo are bindable — Cmd/Ctrl+Z and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z by default. Clear Filters sits in the same list.
“Find in list” is now “Go to selected plugin” (F), because nobody looking for “go to selected” found it under the old name.
Settings is a gear on the top bar.

Workspaces you can save

A Workspace dropdown on the top bar saves the window as you have it — panel sizes and splitters, which panels show and whether their tab bars do, the plugin-list columns, dots or tags, the Active FX splitter, and which tabs are active — under a name. Click a name to bring it back; rename or delete from the same menu. R cycles through your saved workspaces. Workspaces travel with an export of your shortcuts, so one file moves both.

Back up everything, and put it back

Settings → Backup has two buttons. Back up everything… writes your whole Virtue data folder into one .vfxmbak file, wherever you choose to save it — settings, layouts and workspaces, shortcuts, favourites and banks, categories and your colour overrides, notes, ratings, FX snapshots, themes, hidden plugins and blocklists, and the thumbnails kept in that folder. Your licence and trial files are not in it, so a backup carries no licence state.

Restore from backup… takes a .vfxmbak file and tells you what it is before it does anything: when it was made, which VFxM made it, which platform, how many files, how big, and that restoring replaces what you have now. You confirm with Restore Now; there is a progress bar, and Cancel until the point of no return.

Your current data is copied first, to Virtue/Backups/PreRestore_<timestamp>/. The last two are kept.
Restart REAPER afterwards. VFxM saves nothing between the restore and that restart.
An older backup restores in a newer VFxM. A backup made by a newer VFxM is refused before anything is touched.

Backups are manual, and there is no list of past ones — the file is yours, in the folder you put it in. See Back up and restore your VFxM data.

Force-deactivated plugins have a way back

Plugin Manager → Force Deactivated Plugins lists every plugin you have force-deactivated, with Reactivate per plugin and Reactivate All. The list was empty before because it only recorded a case that never happened on a normal machine; every force-deactivate is recorded now, and reactivating un-hides REAPER’s own cache entries as well. This list is separate from the scanner’s blocklist on purpose — one is your choice, the other is a crash record.

Thumbnails

Capture and Autocapture act on the selection. Select five plugins, right-click one of them, and the entries say what they will do — “Autocapture Thumbnail (5)” — and do all five as one scan. Capture takes them one at a time, because it needs you there to frame each window.
Both are in the Favorites right-click menu too, beside Find on list, and the new image lands on the tile straight away.
Capture is no longer greyed out on presets and chains. Autocapture still is, and says why: it photographs a plugin window unattended, and a preset has no window of its own.
Undo and redo work over a preset or a chain.
A scan that cannot start says so, and why — one line in the status bar, one in REAPER’s console, with counts. A scan that does start no longer opens REAPER’s console over the window it is about to photograph.
A plugin REAPER does not list is no longer refused. REAPER’s own list of installed effects can come back with a fraction of what is installed; VFxM now treats it as advice, not proof.

Licensing: the messages that blamed you

Using all your activations no longer reads as an invalid key. Activating a third machine on a two-seat licence used to come back as Invalid license key. It now says how many devices are in use and that deactivating one frees a slot. Fixed on the server too, so 1.2.2 copies get the right message today.
Activating a few times in quick succession was passed through as a bad key; it is now treated as the temporary condition it is, and says so.
The seat count was wrong on every second machine. Activating a second machine reported 1 of 2 at the exact moment it became the second seat, and both machines kept that number. Server and client both fixed.
A brief licence-server outage read as a broken licence; it now shows the message the server sends for that case, which says the licence is fine.
Re-activating a machine you already own does not count against you.
The VFXM- key from your purchase email works everywhere, as written — upper or lower case, with or without spaces around it. Pasting the internal licence id now says plainly that the key is in the purchase email.

Also

Right-click opens the menu on the first click. You no longer have to left-click a row and then right-click it.
A right-click menu acts on the selection, not only on the row under the cursor. Right-click outside the selection and it acts on that row alone.
The Favorites right-click menu is in four sections — Insert, Thumbnail, Organise, Remove.
Selecting a row highlights the whole row, every column.
Developer prefixes leave the shown name. “JS: Chorus” shows as Chorus, and search matches the name you see.
Resizing the window is smooth again with the plugin list open. The list was building a row for every plugin in the library on every frame; it now builds only the rows on screen.
Settings and Plugin Manager split cleanly. Plugin Type Visibility moved from Settings → Browser to Plugin Manager → Database & Scanning, and the thumbnail folder moved to the Thumbnail Scanner section, so Settings → Files is gone. Nothing was duplicated.
The Windows installer, its uninstaller and the plug-in are code-signed. Windows names the publisher as Rodney Florencio da Costa instead of saying the publisher is unknown. SmartScreen may still warn for a while: the certificate is new and has no reputation yet. Click More info, check the publisher, then Run anyway — see Windows SmartScreen warning. 1.2.2 and earlier were unsigned.
Six more languages went from about half the interface to 96 per cent — Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian and Urdu, at 569 of 593 strings. Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German and French are translated except the 48 newest strings, which show in English. This is a machine-checked count of coverage, not a native speaker’s review.
Show and hide columns from the plugin list’s own header. Right-click the header for the Status, Rating and Developer switches that also live in Settings and the View menu.
The plugin list’s background is its own colour — a separate picker in Settings, apart from the overall background.

Fixed

Opening another project no longer crashes REAPER. Active FX could still hold a track from the project you just closed; every track and take it reads is now checked first.
Windows: REAPER no longer hangs on “loading plugin: reaper_virtue.dll”. On some machines REAPER never got past that line on its splash screen. The cause was found by auditing the load path rather than reproduced, so if that was your hang, we would like to hear it is gone.
Windows: nothing sweeps your temp folder at startup any more.
Installing and uninstalling stay inside your own home folder. The path was cut at the first space, so “/Users/John Smith” became “/Users/John”.
Uninstalling removes only VFxM’s own toolbar buttons, matched by exact action id, and neither installing nor uninstalling touches the toolbar while REAPER is running.
macOS: one click acts on the window instead of one to focus it and a second to press the button, and the window comes to the front on the press.
Closing the VFxM window keeps it closed.
Turning off the FX-window hijack takes effect without restarting REAPER, and REAPER’s own FX window opens again.
A crash while capturing a thumbnail is fixed.
A JS effect’s window is captured whole, not cropped to a guessed area.
Plugins keep the identities 1.2.2 gave them, so favourites, ratings, notes, categories and thumbnails stay attached after a rescan.
Windows: a silent install no longer waits for a message box, and the plug-in reports its real version instead of 1.1.0.0.

Known in 1.2.3

Arabic and Urdu still display left to right. There is no right-to-left layout.
The six languages above have string coverage but no human review yet.
48 strings still show in English in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German and French — the Workspace dropdown, Shortcuts export and import, Force Deactivated Plugins, two new colour settings and the capture-menu explanations.
On AZERTY and other non-US layouts a few keys are refused under a punctuation name when binding a shortcut — M on AZERTY is refused as “;”.
Dragging a preset favourite onto an Active FX strip does nothing, as in 1.2.2. Drop it on the track, or double-click it in Favorites.
The macOS 15 capture path is written but switched off. Every machine still uses the capture path that has shipped since 1.0, and 1.2.3 asks for no new Screen Recording permission.

Upgrading

Install over the top. Favourites, banks, thumbnails, notes, categories, your licence, your window layout, your shortcuts and your hidden panels all carry across.