Philterd Developers

New: Philter One, a redaction box for your office, is coming soon. Learn more →

Contact Us

Tell us about your stack and the privacy problems you're trying to solve. We typically respond within one business day.

Prefer email? support@philterd.ai

Please do not enter PII or PHI in this form. If you need to share an example, use a sanitized one.

Reference and how-to

Running Philter Desktop on an Apple Silicon Mac with Parallels

Run Philter Desktop in Windows 11 on ARM under Parallels on an Apple Silicon Mac. Install the Visual C++ ARM64 runtime first so name detection loads.

Philter Desktop is a Windows application. On a Mac with an Apple Silicon (M-series) processor, you can run it in Windows 11 on ARM inside a Parallels Desktop virtual machine. The installer detects ARM and installs the native ARM64 build, so it does not run under x64 emulation.

A new Windows virtual machine may not include the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime, which Philter Desktop’s on-device name detection needs. Install it before running Philter Desktop.

This page applies to Philter Desktop 1.3.0 and earlier. A future version of the Philter Desktop installer will install the runtime for you, and this step will no longer be needed.

The symptom

Without the runtime, documents fail to redact, and the document’s details show an error like this:

Philter Desktop could not save "<file>". The type initializer for 'Microsoft.ML.OnnxRuntime.NativeMethods' threw an exception.

Install the Visual C++ runtime

In the Windows virtual machine:

  1. Download the ARM64 Visual C++ Redistributable from Microsoft: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.arm64.exe.
  2. Run vc_redist.arm64.exe and complete the installation.
  3. Restart Windows.
  4. Run Philter Desktop and redact the document again.

Install the ARM64 package. The x64 and x86 packages do not provide the runtime to Philter Desktop’s native ARM64 build.

In VMware Fusion Pro, this step is not necessary if VMware Tools is installed in Windows. VMware Tools includes the ARM64 Visual C++ Redistributable, so there is no need to install it separately.

If Philter Desktop is not installed yet, download it from the download page and install it after the runtime. Then follow the quick start to set up a policy.

Check the installation (optional)

This section is for information only and is not required. To confirm the runtime is present, run this in PowerShell in the virtual machine:

Get-ChildItem C:\Windows\System32\msvcp140*.dll, C:\Windows\System32\vcruntime140*.dll

The output should list msvcp140.dll, msvcp140_1.dll, and vcruntime140.dll.

To confirm that name detection loads, run Philter Desktop’s self-test:

& "C:\Program Files\Philter Desktop\PhilterDesktop.exe" --selftest

The output should include On-device name detection (ONNX): ENABLED. If you installed Philter Desktop for your user account only, adjust the path to match.

If the error continues, open an issue on GitHub with the self-test output.

Related reading