AR doesn’t have performance knob macros but scene and performance settings on pads. The difference is scenes change all the perameters you have locked when you hit the scene, which holds and can only run one at a time. Performance are pressure sensitive perameter changes and you can hold multiple pads at a time. Scenes and performance are on different pad pages so you can’t toggle at the same time nor mute tracks etc that I can tell which is somewhat annoying because being able apply effects than mute/unmute some tracts at the same time would be great and is a benefit of having performance macro knobs. I would probably trade the pad performance for knob performance in fact.
I do believe setting up the macros to be much easier . You select the pad to edit and navigated track perameters and fiddle with them to lock them into the macro-however keep in mind the modulation possibilities are far fewer than on A4 which is also why it doesn’t feel so tedious.
I just made some amazing perfect macros for a track last night. 1 knob especially did some space effect sounds I’ve never heard. Turned on my machine today and enjoyed them some more then changed my pattern. Guess what. I didn’t save my damn kit and now I will never know exactly what made up that macro : / always save the kit 
