I recently installed audacity 2.3.3 on a fresh installation of Windows 10 (not an upgrade), after previously working on Windows 7 with Audacity for several years.
Since the installation, I am not given the option to read uncompressed audio files directly when importing. I am simply not shown the relevant dialog when dragging files into the project. I tried reinstalling Audacity, and chose the “clear preferences” option just in case I somehow clicked a “don’t show again” button by mistake, but it didn’t fix the problem. Any ideas?
“On-demand loading” (as it was called) has been removed from Audacity, though any old saved projects that have external dependencies will still work.
Too many people were losing work because of (misuse of) this feature, and with SSD’s becoming so common, the benefits of “on-demand” have almost disappeared. The removal of “on-demand” is noted in the manual and the release notes. https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/on_demand_loading.html