It's strange that it stopped working all of a sudden. Nothing has changed in Freerider itself for sure. I suspect there must be something in your operating system/drivers that has changed. If you're using Windows 10 - there was an automatic Windows 10 update a few weeks ago that broke the USB joystick input. The way to get that fixed was to roll back to the old windows libusb drivers. Here are a few links:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6bjS4PEWI
www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=SDnRSL3rDwM
(Also make sure that your Taranis is connecting as a joystick an not as a mass storage device. I'm sure that's an obvious thing, and since you have been using it for so long without problem I don't think that's the issue but I thought I'd mention it anyway...)