Personally I rip my CDs to ogg-vorbis (at quality level 5 or 6). They play fine in Canola, but require installing ogg-support. They may have also required some non-obvious config file change, otherwise the ogg's stopped after a song and didn't move to the next track (mentioned in another thread).

For best compatibility, mp3's would seem to be the choice. Ripping to 192kbps seems a reasonable bit rate.

Ogg's are great, but the mp3 format is more widespread.

For ripping, I agree with CDEX under windows or something like sound juicer in gnome. EasyTag is my preferred utility for editing tags under both windows and a linux computer.