If you just want SOME of the bands, for example if you are doing a neurofeedback program that rewards / inhibits certain bands – the alternative is to use band filters instead of FFT. This is a common approach used in VPL’s such as BrainBay, BioEra, Bioexplorer, OpenViBE, neuromore, etc.
An excellent C language IIR filter design library is Jim Peters FIDLIB. It’s actually the engine used by BioEra and BrainBay. A great feature of this library is that the filter type (bandpass, lowpass, highpass, notch; Butterworth, Bessel, etc.) and band edges can all be specified at runtime. This is how the VPL’s allow dynamic changing of these parameters.
William