It's for a musical project. I wanted a very specific effect applied to some vocals I sang. I couldn't find any tools that did what I wanted, asked on various forums over the years but every pre-built tool someone recommended failed to achieve the effect I was imagining. Out of frustration I ended up writing something myself in Matlab to postprocess a vocal line I recorded and I quite liked the results! (And I know I could have used Python for that but I like Matlab.

Up to this point Matlab was just a personal preference. But then I decided I wanted to experiment with applying that effect in real-time, which would mean creating my own audio unit and throwing it into my DAW, and went looking for ways to make one. Turns out Matlab's got a command for it since 2022b! https://www.mathworks.com/help/audio/audio-plugin-creation-and-hosting.html. so if I could get my hands on it, that would be by far the easiest and quickest way to experiment more with it.

I learned a couple days ago that there are open source tools designed for making AUs -- Cabbage, Faust -- but I've never used them. Since I already have the Matlab code and am familiar with Matlab, I thought it would be nice to just use that toolbox for a quick first pass. It probably wouldn't take long to port it to pyhon, but I've found no Python libraries that can generate an audio unit (without wrapping around what's in the next sentence, which is extra work). There's a C++ library called JUCE that can but I find C++ frustrating and don't have a good dev environment set up for it anymore.

The musical project, by the way, is a mix of a shitpost and a passion project and will never see a cent of earnings, so I cannot justify paying Mathwork's high prices.