Hi Saine, much love to your music!
I’ve shared a nice (and easy!) trick that makes something close to this possible - you’re not previewing the selection, but playing in any pitch from a slice marker:
https://forum.renoise.com/t/play-samples-from-any-position-in-any-pitch/46801
And certainly better than having to fiddle around with some option inside a menu, like in 2.x
Thanks very much!
Just tried it and this is a super useful trick (forum member kopias also pointed this out to me just now) - I’ll surely find use for it in the future and considering this from a sample-mangling side, this opens up a lot of new possibilities as well. Great!
Although to be frank, I’m not sure how much it helps with the ‘reference listening’ angle I had. 
For example, I’m currently in the process of checking out the pre-masters of a 12-track release every now and then, together with some other music lined up next to it, using a couple of different sets of speakers/headphones and so. So with the old version of Renoise, I’ll just load a bunch of wavs up and all of the, say, 15-20 or so, samples are then immediately ready to be played at any pitch - I don’t, for example, have to do any preparation work on them or hold a key down to keep playing from that pitch (I can walk around the room if I want to etc.)
I can then just use the mouse wheel to scroll through them at an instant, zoom in and out, and mouseclick+enter play on them. When I’m done, no need to save any templates, just close the program down and if I wanna do it again, no prob, Renoise starts in no time, after all.
With the phrases method, I’d have to go through these additional steps (might not seem like such a bad thing at first, but it’s a different story when you’d have to do them like 15 times for every wav, each time, when the whole point of this is essentially the “hey I’ll just do a quick checkup on these mixes next to that other album I liked, before continuing with my mixing work in 5 minutes” workflow thing which Renoise excels at imo, having to click stuff as little as possible and having things as readily available as possible). Also, if I understood correctly, with the phrases method the only way to hold a note (not having to hold a key down) from any other pitch than the default one would be to go to the phrases menu and choose a different note, then come back to waveform menu and press the play button in the lower right corner. Just using the keyboard would stop playing every time when the key is released, so, playing a five minute track for instance…
Not to sound ungrateful! Sorry haha, this was a great tip nevertheless.
Anyway. I don’t know if I managed to explain the whole ‘reference listening workflow’ thing too well, it’s hard to put in words and I don’t even know if anyone else out there does it, but it’s really something I’m so used to I can’t live without at this point and I haven’t seen in any other program. I use iZotope RX and Sound Forge quite often, for miscellaneous sample editing duties and random checkups, but they don’t offer anything close to this. Just messy, overlapping windows and dragging them out of each others way all the time.
It just kinda makes me tear my hair out to think that it was such a simple thing and it’s all gone because of a missing button and now I’m stuck with the old Renoise version forever, aaaaaargh. 