Audacity will no longer launch

I am using Audacity v2.0.3 on Linux Mint 16 which is a derivative of Ubuntu 13.10 and was having the same problem.

When Audacity starts up, it looks for a temporary directory to store its temporary files, namely

/var/tmp/audacity-${USER}

where ${USER} has the value of the login username, and the USER environmental variable is usually correctly set during the login process.

To be sure, one can always do

echo ${USER}

to see if it is set and set to the appropriate value.

So the very simple solution is

mkdir /var/tmp/audacity-${USER}

and for privacy, if desired and if your umask is other than 0007,

chmod 0700 /var/tmp/audacity-${USER}

or you could do it in one go with

mkdir -m 0700 /var/tmp/audacity-${USER}

Obviously the user has to have write permission on /var/tmp, otherwise this will need to be done by root who will also have to change the user and group ownership of the created directory to the appropriate user and group.

Why audacity does not create this directory for its-self is a question which should be directed at the writers of the audacity, because popping up a dialog to say that some unamed directory for temporary storage does not exist and then segfaulting is an extremely bad user experience.

The suggestion that one should re-install an operating from scratch just to solve the problem of a missing directory is an unacceptable answer.

I had the same problem with under cinnamon Linux mint 17.1. Solved it by reinstalling audacity after deleting /home/your_username/.audacity-data directory and that fixed the problem