Thanks for the help, this was what I had been trying but to no avail. I managed to get hold of a windows machine and created a working M3U playlist from that. I then used that working playlist to create a simple bash command line script that you can run from any directory on the MP3 player to create a working playlist of all files in that directory.
echo "#EXTM3U^M" \> playlist.m3u;for f in \*; do echo "#EXTINF:0,$f^M" \>\> playlist.m3u;echo "$f^M" \>\> playlist.m3u;echo "^M" \>\> playlist.m3u; done;
