Is there a way to have sped up sound (approximate sound is fine) for faster preview playback speeds? I would love to be able to quickly play through videos to find audio mistakes (e.g. misspoken words) and return to normal speed for fine correction.

Thanks!

kdenlive has audio scrubbing. You can drag the timeline pointer over the timeline and will hear the sound. I do not know other ways to speed up audio preview.

If the audio deeley isn't enough, you can always export the sound and do that in audacity for re-import.

i would really like this option for controlling the playback speed.

It's a very important tool. On AVID, Premiere pro and FCP you can speed up the playback by pressing more times the key L (each time you push it doubles the speed). You can even have a faster backward playback by pressing more times the key J.
More you can also press the J and the L key by keeping pressed together the SHIFT key: in this case you'll have a slow motion playback in both directions.
During all these operation you can hear the audio track of the clip.
I must admit that when I edit several interviews and I have a short deadline to speed up the playback at double or more speed sometimes it's indispensable.

I tried Shotcut and I found that this feature is very well implemented on it. When you press the JKL keys everything is smooth. The playback go in both direction and when you press more times the keys it becomes faster but you can hear the sound. Even frame by frame scrubbing is more precise.
On Kdenlive frame by frame scrubbing misses frames, the backward playback is very slow and it misses a lot of frames. When you acelerate in both direction you have no any sound.
As Shotcut is based on MLT as Kdenlive is, is there no way to make playback good as it is on that software?