Digital audio recording is a nonlinear (or random access) medium—you can go immediately to any spot in a recording without having to rewind or fast forward.

This differs from tape-based recording, which is a linear medium—where you need to rewind or fast forward to hear a particular spot in a recording. To rearrange or repeat material in a linear system, you need to re-record it, or cut and splice it.

Nonlinear systems have several advantages. You can easily rearrange or repeat parts of a recording by reading from parts of the recording in a different order or multiple times. In addition, this re-arrangement is nondestructive, meaning that the original recorded material is not altered.