Foobar 2000 is a great mp3 player, so I was looking for a way to create “sub-playlists” of my main MP3 folder from searches (for artists, mainly) that I could then export to RockBox. The iPod sucks is weak for creating playlists, but this basically due to the lack of a keyboard. Entering letters is the iPod clickwheel is truly a chore. After some searching and trying a couple of plugins that didn’t work for some reason I found the QuickSearch toolbar plugin for foobar 2000 (grab it now as the referring pages might be deleted any day now, here’s the foobar 2000 0.8.x version). 
It lets you create quick searches of your main playlist which can then be saved as a new m3u8 playlist. This you just have to throw into your /Playlists directory in foobar on your iPod, after removing any drive letters and replacing all backslashes with forward slashes with any text editor. Then just browser the playlists on your iPod and enjoy. Note: This will not work with iTunes which should be replaced with RockBox anyway. Hope it helps.
Update: Of course the above can be achieved much more easily within RockBox:
Be sure to have SETTINGS>GENERAL SETTINGS>PLAYLIST>RECURSIVELY INSERT DIRECTORIES set to YES.
Files>LONG SELECT (keep iPod Select-Button pressed for a second or so) the Folder with the files you want to add to your playlist>Playlist Catalog>Add to New Playlist. Now (try to) create a name for your new playlist with the RockBox “Virtual Keyboard” which may take some practice. Two things: No need to create a file extension as this will be appended automatically, and pressing Play will save everything you have entered and start the insertion process. You might wanna just create a short playlist name and later edit it with a file system explorer when your iPod is connected to your PC or Mac.
That’s it. The new playlist will be in the /Playlists directory with the m3u8 extension.
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