Greenwing Audio, a start-up based out of Miami Beach, Florida, launched a Kickstarter campaign at the beginning of this month to raise funds for their most ambitious project to date. For anyone who listens to music while they run, work out at the gym, commute to work by bus or train, ride a bike or simply want to be able to wear a scarf and headphones at the same time, this is obviously fantastic news. I am continually driven crazy by the number of times I’ve hooked myself on a door handle with excess cord or gotten over-enthusiastic about a particular track and hand-jived those suckers right out of my ears. If Greenwing can manage to collect the $435,000 in pledges they are asking for, those days will be far behind me.

 
Greenwing Audio’s goal is to “completely reinvent the design and usability of the portable music player”. To that end, they started working on a prototype for Split, hoping to create the most non-invasive listening experience possible for its consumers. They made the earbuds as small as technology would allow, foregoing bells and whistles like LED’s, buttons, cables and touch screens, to allow the focus to solely be on the music and listener experience itself. Without the use of cords or Bluetooth, Split is a completely hands free player. Moving between tracks and volume control are accomplished by gentle “bite clicks”. One bite skips the current track, while two bites controls the volume. A tap to the right half of Split will lock and unlock the device, should you want to listen uninterrupted while eating. Sounds pretty amazing, right? Here’s how it works.

 
The two halves of Split are held together by magnets; pulling them apart powers up the device. The right and left earphone are synchronized by high precision crystal clocks that allow the two separate parts to play in unison without being physically connected in any way. The only time the right and left earphones interact with each other is with a short near-field signal when the track or volume is changed, which Greenwing claims “reduces the amount of radiation your head and body are exposed to by more than 1,000 times as compared to a Bluetooth streaming headset”.

 
While this safer, nearly radiation-free little gadget may have you excited about spending hours listening to tunes hassle-free, there are a few drawbacks. The production version of Split is expected to hold only 256MB of music (roughly 24 songs) and will not interface with your existing audio devices (you’ll have to load music directly into the device). Still, with a roughly four hour battery life, it seems like more than enough for workout enthusiasts and commuters willing to swap out their playlists every few days or so.

 
As of today, Greenwing is only a little over 10% of the way to their $435,000 goal, with twenty days left in the campaign. Interested parties looking to receive the Split MP3 player from the first pre-production batch are being asked to pledge $155 through their Kickstarter site, and smaller pledges will earn you anything from shirts to invites to exclusive split social events.