I don't understand the "free" bit.  That was why I freaked over the lifetime SPLAT, and never bit.  How well does "free" work in the Bandlab business model?
 
I have a HUGE !!! commitment to SPLAT, in the form of being a good engineer.  I doubt I have the remaining brain cells to learn much of anything new.  That said, I am installing CbB ... don't know why, but .....

I was elated when Bandlab rescued Cakewalk and I quickly installed the first version and only had a few tweaks to get it set up exactly like Splat. You can open both programs at the same time and compare settings and such. For me CbB works exactly like Splat. The only difference is at the very top of the window it has a orange icon instead of black. Below that everything else is identical.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised that for me, CbB was far more stable than Splat, very few crashes and none of he crashes that required a reboot. You can work in CbB and if you like resume working on the file in Splat. CbB is actually Splat 2017.11, which was the last version of Splat that was never released. The last one we got was 2017.10. I can't understand why anyone would hesitate to try CbB, it doesn't affect your Splat install at all.

Other than it installs an auto-start "Assistant" on boot, which you can't right-click to "exit".  I don't allow anything running on my DAW other than what I need.  So had to msconfig that bother away.
 
As far as SPLAT stability, I just completed in-total a 105 hour session with NO crashes other than the 2 times I pulled in a project-incompatible plugin.  Of course, I'm running Win7-64 and never update......
 
All that said aside, I do hope that Bandlab is successful at resurrecting this DAW.

gmp
CbB is actually Splat 2017.11, which was the last version of Splat that was never released. The last one we got was 2017.10. I can't understand why anyone would hesitate to try CbB, it doesn't affect your Splat install at all.

Its actually Platium 2017.11 plus 3 months worth of new features, several bug fixes and enhancements. The latest version is 2018.06. You can read about the new features here.

GregGraves
Other than it installs an auto-start "Assistant" on boot, which you can't right-click to "exit".  I don't allow anything running on my DAW other than what I need.  So had to msconfig that bother away.
 
As far as SPLAT stability, I just completed in-total a 105 hour session with NO crashes other than the 2 times I pulled in a project-incompatible plugin.  Of course, I'm running Win7-64 and never update......
 
All that said aside, I do hope that Bandlab is successful at resurrecting this DAW.

Greg, I can relate to your staying with Win 7 and never updating. No doubt there are likely no more surprises with unusual crashes or behavior you've haven't seen before. It's nice to have a predictable system.
 
 I don't take it quite as far as you, but I do similar things in my approach. I have Win updates disabled and only update right before trying a new Splat or as the case now -  CbB. I then disable Win updates again. 
 
I did upgrade to Win 10 when it was free after I found out that I could have a dual boot system of Win 10 and Win 7 or 8 in case I didn't like Win 10 or found it was problematic. But I must say Win 10 has been the easiest OS upgrade I've ever done all the way back to the DOS days.

 
I also make Acronis image files of my C drive whenever I make changes. This has saved my butt many times and made troubleshooting unnecessary. I like staying with a version for about 2-4 months, so I get a chance to see all the bugs. If I run into too many bugs, I just revert back to an earlier image.

Rick Viola
One this that bothers me is, with Sonar downloads from the Command Center, any install file is saved locally in Downloads/Cakewalk. I have archived everything I ever downloaded for Cakewalk. With the Bandlab Assistant, I don't see the install file for Cakewalk saved locally. It probably deletes the temporary file after install.

Bandlab Assistant placed the Cakewalk.exe Installation files in my Documents/Downloads folder. Where they belong, like with all the other normally downloaded application installations . I sure wish CCC did that with Sonar.

Steev

Rick Viola
One this that bothers me is, with Sonar downloads from the Command Center, any install file is saved locally in Downloads/Cakewalk. I have archived everything I ever downloaded for Cakewalk. With the Bandlab Assistant, I don't see the install file for Cakewalk saved locally. It probably deletes the temporary file after install.

Bandlab Assistant placed the Cakewalk.exe Installation files in my Documents/Downloads folder. Where they belong, like with all the other normally downloaded application installations . I sure wish CCC did that with Sonar.

By default CCC doesn't do that, but I changed the preferences to tell it to download to my custom folder of my choosing. With CbB it's best to save each update in it's own folder since they all have the same name - cakewalk.exe. If you leave it in the downloads folder the next update will overwrite that file

The only file I have in "c:/user/yourname/appdata/roaming/bandlab-assistant/downloads" is asistant.exe and is 48MB. I don't like not having the download not stored locally.
 
 

Something to keep in mind. We are very lucky that Bandlad came along and bought the code. However, we are blessed that Noel is still on board. What we get is consistency and the person that understands better than anyone else the code behind Sonar. One should view this from a users view as a true win win! 
 
We came from dead in the water to full speed ahead. This doesn't happen often. 

Noel is doing an amazing job. Period.