You can download ControlFreak from http://mtvoid.com/. It contains a Symbian application for the phone and a Winamp plug-in for the PC-8). The Winamp plug-in takes commands from the phone via a preconfigured Bluetooth COM port and controls the PC.
After installing the program and configuring your Bluetooth connection, you initiate a connection from your phone to your computer using the Connect menu option, or simply by pressing the navigation pad. After searching for nearby Bluetooth devices, you will be presented with a list. The next time you select Connect you don't need to search for devices, since ControlFreak remembers which device you last used and asks if you want to reconnect. In fact, if you enable Reconnect on startup in the settings, ControlFreak will automatically connect the next time you start the application. Once the connection is made, the virtual device cover will slide down to reveal details about the current track.
In the main player mode, the top part of the screen shows details about the current track (including artist, title, album, and year if ID3 tags are present). Below that is either more track information, a preview of upcoming songs, or real-time spectral analysis of the current audio, depending on the view selected. You can change views using either the Options menu or 1, 2, and 3 shortcut keys. By pressing 0, you can also open or close the cover.
When you are in any of these player modes, you can easily control the playback of your music by using the navigation pad. Pressing the center key on the navigation pad pauses or plays the music. Pressing and holding the navigation pad stops the music. Pressing the navigation pad up or down increases or decreases the volume. Pressing the navigation pad to the right or left skips forward or backward in the playlist. And pressing and holding the navigation pad to the right or left allows you to quickly skip through the current track.
When using your phone, you might not want to have ControlFreak in the foreground all the time. So, to keep track of what is currently playing, the settings have a "Track change" pop-up option. With this enabled, you get a little pop-up box in the top of the screen showing track information changes, no matter what application you are in. You also have the option of enabling "Phone app" shortcuts. With this enabled, you can use basic controls such as play/pause, next/previous track, and volume up/down from the phone application idle screen.
The other modes available enable you to browse your media library, manage the current playlist, and control the desktop. You also can access these from the Options menu or by using their respective shortcuts: 6, 7, and 8.
The playlist mode displays the contents of the playlist you have loaded in Winamp. You can move the focus up or down by clicking the navigation pad up or down, or speed things up by clicking the navigation pad left or right to move a full screen at a time. The smart thing about the way the playlist view in ControlFreak works is that it loads information from the computer only when it needs it. So, even if you have thousands of tracks in your playlist, you won't be sitting there waiting for the data to be sent to the phone before you can start browsing. If you want to start playing a track, just select it and press the navigation pad. If you want a track to start playing after the current one finishes, just press and hold the navigation pad. The track will flash a couple of times, and then will move to the end of the current track. If you keep repeating this with a number of tracks you can build up a queue of tracks to play. To remove a track from the playlist press the C key or choose Remove from the Options menu.
Searching for a track is a particularly useful feature. You can select Search from the Options menu or just start typing keys, and ControlFreak automatically opens a search query that includes T9 predictive text support. The search results are based on a substring match of the query and the playlist titles (unless the query is only one or two characters). You can also sort the playlist in a variety of ways, and randomize it. This is a better way of playing your music randomly than using your player's shuffle setting, since you are still able to see the track order.
The media library mode allows you to browse all of the audio and video files added to Winamp's media library. You can browse artists, albums, videos, and playlists. When you find something you like, simply select Play or Queue from the Options menu. You can search for individual tracks in your library from the browse mode list, just as you can in playlist mode. You search for a particular item within a list via the jump-to feature. Just type the first letter of what you are looking for, using multiple taps of the number keys, and the focus jumps to the first item that starts with that letter. If you can't think of what to play, you can always just press the 0 key and ControlFreak will jump to a random item.
One of the more exciting features of ControlFreak is the ability to view your desktop directly on your phone (this is called desktop control mode). Watching a movie on your computer and having it display the video on your phone is one cool use of this feature. To do this, though, you need to disable hardware video overlay in Winamp's video preferences. By default, it plays video directly to the video card to increase playback performance.
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