Hi, if you use brasso,(or any other metal polish,) on a CD, you might as well just throw it in the bin before you start and save yourself the expense and effort. It is far too coarse and will simply add a multitude of scratches to compound the problem. Toothpaste is a little better, it contains a much finer abrasive, specifically, jeweller's rouge, which, if applied assiduously enough, can remove very fine scratches from a disk. Be aware though that it is a very fine abrasive, and it will take a long, long time to polish out even very fine scratches.
As an alternative, there used to be a product made for just this happenstance. These were special wipes, impregnated with a sort of liquid, air-drying plastic film which you used to wipe/clean/coat the playing surface of the disk. I did actually try one once, and it did actually work, but they were very far from cheap, and I somehow doubt that the coating so applied would last for very long. Since CDRs are now so cheap, it's probably more cost effective to just make a working copy off all your disks, and simply make another when the existing gets damaged, as it will in time.
You should as a matter of course, clean every CD before putting it into the drive. CDs should be cleaned with a dry, clean, lint-free cloth, and wiped only in a radial direction from centre outwards, and NEVER around the disk!
Playing scratched CDs should not harm your drive, however it will cause extra wear and tear because of the extra seeking for damaged data, and it is possible that the damaged data could possibly cause damage to the speakers of an audio system if it were an audio disk.
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