large amount of objects causing game to lag, gamemaker help

okay, I'm making a custom guitar hero game and each note is an object, I've made a program that simulates sheet music where I place notes on a staff and when I'm done it is outputed to a text file contaning GML telling the game where to put notes, the thing is, if theres alot of notes gamemaker will lag, if this were a normal game I'd just deactivate the notes that aren't on screen, but seeing how that isn't in option (if they were deactivated they would stop moving down, never appear on screen, and never be played) so is there an alternative to deactivating objects that makes the game run faster, I wouldn't think so but I thought I'd ask

don't use so many objects?

just create/destroy them on the fly

this is a pretty good general thumb-rule

its guitar hero, less object means less notes, and destroying/creating means I have to rig every not onto a timelines, which is a big fat pain in the but, I guess this means I just have to trash it and start over from the ground up

uh no the goal is to just have only the objects needing to be visible at any moment exist

i don't think guitar hero would need more than 50

really if you're doing something like guitar hero, you shouldn't be relying on gm's built-in timing since any sort of lag will probably screw it up (guessing here)

i wouldn't be surprised if the official guitar hero games either use a custom sound format or a container format that tells the engine to create a note when it reaches a specific byte in the sound file (offset of course so the notes reach the bottom of the screen just in time for the music); something like that's harder to set up but it pretty much guarantees it'll be in sync

they way I got it set up every single note exists but only the notes on the guitar are visible, its not a very good system, so I'm gonna have to replace it, I'm gonna have to probably work on the byte thing, I'm using the saudio dll for the sound and it has byte functions, so that will work

My suggestion is when something goes out of your view (assuming you're using a view), make it invisible, destroy it, or just don't run any code for it.

Use Time Lines with Xgoff's advice.

You don't need a separate instance for each note. Try using arrays.