wrote ...
Why does Windows Media Player claim it is playing
my song at 128 kbits / second?

I'll bet you are playing a (compressed) MP3 file.

That's 16000 bytes / second. I thought it only worked at these
sampling rates:

11025
22050
44100

Yes, those are some common sampling rates.
for uncompressed recording. The last one (44.1K)
is the CD standard.

and these bit rates:

8
16
32

Those are actually sample widths (not rates) for
uncompressed encoding. 16 is most common (CD
standard), 8 is used mostly for low-quality telephony,
and 24-bit is more common than 32-bit and is used
for tracking, mastering, etc. IME, WMP will not play
24 or 32 bit files.