How to add an audio file to a shell script

How can I add an audio file (OGG vorbis) into a shell script making the script as small as possible and at the same time being able to execute it on as most systems as possible? I want the audio file be played. I don’t want it to be uuencoded, because sharutils are not installed on many systems. base64 is nice, but makes the file/script bigger, which I don’t want. Should I use mplayer or the play command from the sox package? Is it more common on Linux/BSD systems? Or is there another media player mostly installed? Should I convert the audio file to another format/codec (if that doesn’t make the file much bigger) to have more possible players to play the file back or is OGG vorbis a good choice?