On my admittedly obsolete Windows 8.1 laptop, Audacity (64-bit) v3.3.3 has recently become unable to use 3 of my flash drives (two of my USB sticks, and one of my microSD cards) for Temporary storage.
All of my several flash drives are in good health, with error-free ExFAT filesystems. All have previously been usable for Audacity temporary storage, and indeed some of them still are usable for that.
Just 3 of them (2 USB sticks and one microSD card) have recently become unusable for Audacity temp storage. If Audacity is configured to use one of these for temp storage, Audacity crashes on startup with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION_READ.
Before crashing, Audacity creates 3 temp files on the drive. It creates the “New Project…N-1.aup3unsaved” file containing 65536 bytes, and the “New Project…N-1.aup3unsaved-shm” file with 32768 bytes. It also creates an empty “New Project…N-1.aup3unsaved.wal” file with 0 bytes. After the crash, these files remain on the drive. (If I again try to start Audacity using the same drive, Audacity creates another such set of three temp files and again crashes.)
Deleting the Audacity.cfg file doesn’t help in this case. The crashes will still occur.
I don’t know why this problem occurs with just 2 of my USB sticks and one of my microSD cards (all of which were formerly usable with Audacity), while my other flash drives still currently remain usable for Audacity temp storage — (although I anticipate that the same crash condition might eventually develop with any of those other drives in the future, just as it has now happened with these 3).
I have not yet tested with the 32-bit version of Audacity to see if it might avoid the problem.