The term CD ALTERNATIVE refers to three different types of media storage: TAPE (4 letters), DAT (3 letters) and TNOTE (5 letters). TAPE is a magnetic recording medium made of plastic, which was used in the past for audio and video recordings. DAT stands for Digital Audio TAPE, which was a digital audio recording format developed in the late 1980s. Finally, TNOTE stands for TAPE Note, which is a type of digital audio TAPE developed by Sony in the early 1990s.