Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing, with a few exceptions. Not really relevant in the greater music scene.

But digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course pop was almost all synth – digital synth – just like today.

> Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing

I was specifically talking about end-to-end digital music production being used to "clean up" recordings per the article. Not whatever "scene" you are conjuring.

> Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster.

For people with limited resources (i.e. indie musicians without huge budgets), digital multi-track recording was not democratized until the introduction of low-cost hard disk storage at sufficient capacity to allow digital multi-track recording at home, roughly around 2002~2003.

Of course I'm aware of synthesizers, etc. I was an electronic musician myself during this period, and I lived it. I had the gear racks, ADAT machines, etc.

We did not have the resources as independent musicians to use non-linear digital editing software broadly until storage became cheaper.

Again, a lot of that music was typically done with looping and sample hits arranged on a midi sequencer, similar to trackers, but with distributed infrastructure.

Listen to older KMFDM, for example, the looping really stands out due to the limited storage they had when arranging, they would arrange sample hits and loops as I was talking about above.

Musicians with studio backing and infinite money could afford giant digital productions suites and were using crude versions of Pro Tools by the early '90s, am well aware.