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Remember when it was simple to know and explain what type of music you liked? You turned on the radio, found a station that got your groove on, and rolled the dial when you felt like listening to something different. Whether it was modern rock, alternative, country, or swing - you could call it by name, and you knew what to buy at the music shop.

Nowadays, you don't find yourself listening to the radio as much, but rather you play music through your computer speakers and portable digital players. MP3s and the Internet opened up a new world for you, broadening your choices with over 90,000 artists and three million songs. Now, however, you sometimes find yourself exhausted by the abundance. The break from radio was liberating, but life without the shackles is overwhelming.

According to MuBu.com's CEO and founder John Adams, what you miss is called "collaborative filtering," the systematic way that radio stations identify and categorize the kind of music you like based on preferences of other listeners like you. So, for example, if you like Matchbox 20, chances are that you'll like Pearl Jam or Third Eye Blind. The radio station knows this, and it will play music of that same genre so you won't change the station at the commercial break. This is simple, right? But you don't have that same type of filtering process to aid your music search when you use text-based music sites such as MP3.com or launch.com. Even worse, you are limited to specific requests when you use Napster, Gnutella, or other file-sharing applications, which makes it even more difficult to find new artists. Music Buddha, or rather MuBu.com, which just launched this week, is a new type of web site that attempts to solve this dilemma.

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MuBu.com has assembled quite the stellar crew to help filter and choose the music you don't even know you're looking for. Founder John Adams previously started Imagine Radio (SonicNet) before it was purchased by MTV, and co-founders Kent and Keith Zimmerman part-owned and edited The Gavin Report, a standard music-industry journal. Chief architect of the technology behind the Buddha is Brian Adams, who came from CBSI, along with many others in MuBu's technical group. The editors are all experts in their respective genres, including Gill Alexander, Jon Fojtik, Dean Kattari, and popular house DJ David Garcia. Not surprisingly, former pop star Thomas Dolby Robertson, founder of Beatnik, is part of the lineup as well.

Next: How does it work?