Comment by catalogia

Adobe Lightroom seems comparable (non-destructive image editing.) It uses a sqlite database that points to image files on the filesystem. I think precisely the same approach could be taken with an audio editing application.

You could also consider putting the audio files into the sqlite db, which might work alright. I've heard of image thumbnails being stored in sqlite dbs (maybe by Lightroom iirc?) though those are probably smaller than your audio clips I'm guessing.