Let $\mathcal A$ and $\mathcal B$ be commutative and semisimple Banach algebras and let $\theta \in \Delta (\mathcal B)$ . In this paper, we prove that $\mathcal A\times _{\theta }\mathcal B$ is a type I-BSE algebra if and only if ${\mathcal A}_e$ and $\mathcal B$ are so. As a main application of this result, we prove that $\mathcal A\times _{\theta }\mathcal B$ is isomorphic with a $C^*$ -algebra if and only if ${\mathcal A}_e$ and $\mathcal B$ are isomorphic with $C^* $ -algebras. Moreover, we derive related results for the case where $\mathcal A$ is unital.

Let $a\in \mathbb{R}$ , and let $k(a)$ be the largest constant such that $\sup |\text{cos}(na)-\cos (nb)|<k(a)$ for $b\in \mathbb{R}$ implies that $b\in \pm a+2\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}\mathbb{Z}$ . We show that if a cosine sequence $(C(n))_{n\in \mathbb{Z}}$ with values in a Banach algebra $A$ satisfies $\sup _{n\geq 1}\Vert C(n)-\cos (na).1_{A}\Vert <k(a)$ , then $C(n)=\cos (na).1_{A}$ for $n\in \mathbb{Z}$ . Since $\!\sqrt{5}/2\leq k(a)\leq 8/3\!\sqrt{3}$ for every $a\in \mathbb{R}$ , this shows that if some cosine family $(C(g))_{g\in G}$ over an abelian group $G$ in a Banach algebra satisfies $\sup _{g\in G}\Vert C(g)-c(g)\Vert <\!\sqrt{5}/2$ for some scalar cosine family $(c(g))_{g\in G}$ , then $C(g)=c(g)$ for $g\in G$ , and the constant $\!\sqrt{5}/2$ is optimal. We also describe the set of all real numbers $a\in [0,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}]$ satisfying $k(a)\leq \frac{3}{2}$ .

Associated with two commutative Banach algebras $A$ and $B$ and a character $\theta $ of $B$ is a certain Banach algebra product $A\,{{\times }_{\theta }}\,B$, which is a splitting extension of $B$ by $A$. We investigate two topics for the algebra $A\,{{\times }_{\theta }}\,B$ in relation to the corresponding ones of $A$ and $B$. The first one is the Bochner–Schoenberg–Eberlein property and the algebra of Bochner–Schoenberg–Eberlein functions on the spectrum, whereas the second one concerns the wide range of spectral synthesis problems for $A\,{{\times }_{\theta }}\,B$.

The notion of BSE algebras was introduced and first studied by Takahasi and Hatori and later studied by Kaniuth and Ülger. This notion depends strongly on the multiplier algebra $M( \mathcal{A} )$ of a commutative Banach algebra $ \mathcal{A} $. In this paper we first present a characterisation of the multiplier algebra of the direct sum of two commutative semisimple Banach algebras. Then as an application we show that $ \mathcal{A} \oplus \mathcal{B} $ is a BSE algebra if and only if $ \mathcal{A} $ and $ \mathcal{B} $ are BSE. We also prove that if the algebra $ \mathcal{A} \hspace{0.167em} {\mathop{\times }\nolimits}_{\theta } \hspace{0.167em} \mathcal{B} $ with $\theta $-Lau product is a BSE algebra and $ \mathcal{B} $ is unital then $ \mathcal{B} $ is a BSE algebra. We present some examples which show that the BSE property of $ \mathcal{A} \hspace{0.167em} {\mathop{\times }\nolimits}_{\theta } \hspace{0.167em} \mathcal{B} $ does not imply the BSE property of $ \mathcal{A} $, even in the case where $ \mathcal{B} $ is unital.