I like having a visiting band, but as a former band member I probably get more enjoyment out of watching other bands than many in the stands do. I don't like it, however, when a visiting band does pregame. I feel as if pregame should be the dominion of the home team (although I would still consider letting the visiting director conduct the national anthem an appropriate gesture).
There were a lot of times when both bands played at once and and it sounded like a garbled mess IMO. Also, I was at the Iowa/ISU game last year and our band sits in the stands kind of like our south endzone seats, but the Iowa band is basically wrapped around an endzone at field level. If they sat in the visitor seats I wouldn't mind as much, but I'm sure that has a lot to do with selling more tickets.
I hate the band arrangement when we go to IC. The band is ~340 people and they put us into maybe 500 seats. Most instruments would require that each person have a couple seats worth of space, and the sousaphones require more like 4 apiece. Drumline usually ends up on the field level, so I'm not including them in the seat count. The only positive thing about them packing us so tightly in IC is that our sound is that much more concentrated. 115+ dB in 2008!
Don't like both bands playing at the same time. Also, Iowa pushed the limit on making noise while we were calling an audible. But, I was on the south end, maybe our band did the same to them on the north end.
Nice pre-game and halftime shows from both bands though.
Managing the bands is tricky enough when it's just the ISU band (trying to cooperate with the PA stuff and all). I can't imagine how much more difficult it is when you have a second band in the stadium, especially when they're not used to how ISU runs things. I thought that the Iowa band was definitely pushing the snap with their playing, and IIRC the ISU band typically doesn't do that, even when teams are in the north endzone. I can't remember purposely cutting it too close in my 4 years in the band, and it only happened a few times accidentally.