Today my new midi keyboard , ( an M-Audio Oxygen 61 ) finally arrived!
In the past , as a child I had regular piano lessons for almost 7 years but somewhere close to high school I abandoned it..
Lately and after watching Nodame Cantabille ( great anime btw xD ) it all suddenly came back to me , so since my birthday is near ( 11-Aug ) my girlfriend <3 bought me this as a gift! 
I am using it with synthesia a very nice program to learn and play the piano that uses midi files as input and has an impressive feature list and actually makes it “fun” to play and reduces very much the overall difficulty curve of learning to play complicated pieces..
Its learning pack is kind of expensive ( 40$ ) so I am planning to buying it to support its programmer , sometime soon but not right now.. For now its free mode is more than enough..!
One of the down-sides of synthesia is that it is a windows targeted application but thanks to the great work by the wine guys it plays with no problems at all using wine ( 1.5.10 )..! There is an other program which is linux oriented called linthesia but for some strange reason it refuses to start at all on my machine and from what I gather it has very limited capabilities compared to synthesia..!
The keyboard required no configuration on my part since it was recognized instantly when plugged in the USB port ( I am running Lubuntu 12.04 ) , the only “hack” needed was starting timidity in a pulseaudio friendly mode , done by issuing : timidity -A100 -iA -B2,8 -Os -EFreverb=0 2>&1 & and then chosing the keyboard from the synthesia menu and the testing one by one the midi out ports until sound came out..!
Thats about it..!
I am now trying to learn the following piece , in one day after so many years , I am close to the middle xD :
Yann Tiersen: Comptine d’un autre été
