MPEG 1 Audio Layer I

MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, commonly abbreviated to MP1, is one of three audio formats included in the MPEG-1 standard. It is a deliberately simplified version of MPEG-1 Audio Layer II, created for applications where lower compression efficiency could be tolerated in return for a less complex algorithm that could be executed with simpler hardware requirements. While supported by most media players, the codec is considered largely obsolete, and replaced by MP2 or MP3.

For files only containing MP1 audio, the file extension .mp1 is used.

MPEG-1 layer I was also used by the Digital Compact Cassette format, in the form of the PASC audio compression codec. Because of the need of a steady stream of frames per second on a tape-based medium, PASC uses the rarely used (and under-documented) padding bit in the MPEG header to indicate that a frame was padded with 32 extra 0-bits (four 0-bytes) to change a short 416-byte frame into 420 bytes. The varying frame size only occurs when a 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo audio signal is encoded at 384 kilobits per second, because the bitrate of the uncompressed signal is not an exact multiple of the bitrate of the compressed bit stream.