Garritan has posted its second album of free holiday music, A GPO Christmas 2. The album is a collaborative effort of the Garritan Personal Orchestra community.

A community of professional and amateur composers and arrangers from all over the world met on the Internet and agreed to submit their own recordings of holiday pieces, to be freely distributed on the site.

Each of these orchestral recordings were made not with large, live orchestras in vast recording studios at huge expense, but rather were created by a single person working on a computer. Most of what you’ll hear was created by someone playing at a keyboard and meticulously programming and editing musical phrases in a digital sequencing program.

Check out Toby Bresnahan’s take on What Child is This? for an example of the music on the free CD.

The tracks are available for free download at the Garritan site.